Kauai

You will notice if you have been reading my blog lately that I changed the header. We spent half of our time in Oahu and half in Kauai. This is where we stayed when we went to Kauai. We thought we were going to stay at the Wiamea Plantation Cottages. It turned out we weren't exactly comfortable there. It was a unique place and lots of people would love it. It was highly recommended by a trusted friend, but it was not what we expected. It was very warm when we arrived there and we found that the cottages were wide open. There were screens on the windows, but in order to sleep we had to leave all the windows open as there was no air conditioning. We were all used to having our windows all closed and locked at night so the next morning, we checked out and after checking out a few places checked into the Hilton Resort. Here are a few pictures from the Plantation Cottages. They look really good in pictures. Probably if they had been air conditioned we would have stayed there. After the hustle and bustle of Waikiki, this place was just a little too isolated.

The front of our cottage

The back of the cottage

So we loaded up the rental car and were out of there.

Aloha for now.

Surgery Successful

This is an update to my post for today. The cataract surgery went well and Hubby is happy to be back home. It will be hard for him to keep from overdoing it for a few days. We bought a small palm tree a couple of days ago to put by the pool that he will not be able to plant for awhile. If I don't watch him, he'll be out in the back yard digging a hole for it. We appreciate those of you who said a prayer for him.
Aloha!

Some Unique Things in Hawaii

I am writing this on Tuesday afternoon to be posted in the morning. Early tomorrow morning (it will be this morning when this posts) I will be going with the Hubby to have cataract surgery on one of his eyes. He has been dreading this for a long time, so it will be good to get it done so that he can start recovery.

I thought I would share with you some interesting and unique things we saw in Hawaii.

This is a beautiful blue Macaw

You don't see black swans too often. At least I don't.

A Scottie bench. How cool is that.

Chickens and roosters are not unique, but I thought it was unique the way they are running around wild all over the island of Kauai. They're not wild inthat they would be afraid of you, they are very friendly and not afraid of people.

I don't know what kind of bird this is. It was walking around on the grounds of a lighthouse we visited on the island of Kauai.

This dog was on the beach facing the ocean. He didn't move, thank goodness. He looks rather large, and I am terrified of large dogs, but I couldn't resist taking this picture. How often do you see a pair of dog ears sticking up by the ocean.

Coconuts growing on a tree. I was amazed that there were coconut trees everywhere. We have different kinds of palms growing in Arizona, but no coconut trees. It's probably too hot. I had seen the coconut trees, of course, when I was there 21 years ago but had forgotten that all those palm trees were coconut trees. I'm a "nut" for coconuts so I had to take this picture.

Aloha for now. Tomorrow I'll post some more pictures.

After the Holiday

I've been very busy this past couple of days. I mentioned I wanted to make a DVD of our Hawaiian trip. Well I finished it yesterday afternoon. It was the first one I've done since I started blogging in January. It's amazing how you can forget how things are done when you haven't done them for awhile. It came back to me rather quickly though. Our son and daughter came over at noon today for burgers and a viewing of the DVD. I made them a copy of it also. (I wrote this last night to be posted this morning. I see that kinda messed up the time-frame. Hope it isn't too confusing.)

After looking through all our Hawaiian pictures, I decided to post these today because I think the story behind them is interesting.

I have no idea who these people are. We watched from the rocking chairs on the front porch of the resort as limo after limo pulled up and a bride and groom got out and went inside. This happened at regular intervals. I think it's about every 15 minutes. Evidently traditional weddings in Japan are extremely expensive. It was reported they can cost up to $100,000. so this resort offers a package deal, wedding, reception, pictures, a stay at the hotel, even the wedding dress and tuxedo loan plus other essentials for a wedding for $10,000. There seems to be no end to the couples who took advantage of this plan. It was interesting to observe.

I put the following picture on our computer as wallpaper because I thought it was so pretty. I wanted to share it with you.

This was in the lobby of the resort. That's hubby standing in the doorway on the right. Those doors go out to an area where you can get something to eat or drink and then to the beach. Wow! I wish I was still there.

Aloha!

More Hawaii pix

Aloha again! I've been busy since I got home sifting through over 500 pictures and working on a DVD. I'm about half finished with it and thought about not doing a blog post today, but decided I would go ahead and post a few more pictures.

In the lobby of our hotel

The daughter, the son and the hubby rocking on the front porch of the hotel watching the comings and goings.

Me taking their picture

Since this is Memorial Day weekend, it seemed appropriate to go ahead and post the pictures we took at the Arizona Memorial. This, of course, is a must see if you go to Honolulu. We were told we needed to go early if we wanted to get in. 6:30 am was the suggested time, so at 6:30 we jumped in a cab and headed out. When we got there there was already a long line, but it wasn't open yet and the longer we stood there the longer the line got. We were glad we came early. However, when we left, that line had all disappeared. I'm thinking if we had gone later we wouldn't have had to stand in line at all. We could have just gone in, but who knew.

I don't know the people in the above picture. Just wanted to show the wall with the names of all who lost their lives on the USS Arizona that fateful day.

It is so awesome to see the remains of the ship under the water with parts of it sticking out of the water, and see the oil still rising to the surface after all these years. It really brings tears to your eyes.

Mahalo and Aloha!

For Show & Tell this week I wanted to share with you the things I bought on our trip to Hawaii. If you are coming here from Kelli's Show & Tell, and if you're interested, you can click HERE to go to my main page for more on our trip that we just came back from.

A coffee mug, of course.

Some special coffee, of course.

A shell necklace.

A cap

This is something I'd never seen before. I hardly know how to describe it. Maybe you can get the idea by looking at the pictures. The little thing on the side turns to twist the bottom of the moisture cream "thingy", which by the way is a freebe from Clinique. As you twist it, it forces the cream to the top. Not a good explanation I know, but it's the best I can do. The picture below is the other side of it.

This is the only thing Hubby bought (besides food items) -- a windchime for our patio.

No explanation needed for the above.

I thought this small dish was pretty. I sat it on top of some books in the living room.

I can never resist coconut lotion.

Remember the chocolate shirts from a few days ago? Well this is made by the same company and it is dyed with Lavender. Mmmm smells good. They also had shirts dyed with coffee, mango, and a few other things. I had a hard time deciding between the lavender and the coffee. These shirts are made by Crazy Shirts. They have shops all over in Hawaii. They had the chocolate ones there too and I was tempted just to buy another chocolate shirt. They also make Key Lime, but they didn't have them at the stores I went to. That was the one I really wanted -- Key Lime. That will give me something to look for next time I'm on vacation. Or, I may just have to go to their website and order one.

ALOHA!!!

In Waikiki

When we were in Waikiki in 1987 I was convinced that the best place to stay there was the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, although that was not where we stayed. I was wrong. This is the best place to stay -- Moana Surfrider Resort. It is right on the ocean almost right next to the Royal Hawaiian. The header picture was taken from their website. All the rest of the pictures are ones we took.

We were on the 16th floor. There were two balconies off our room. One overlooked the ocean and one overlooked the city. Here are shots from those two balconies.

If you look very closely you can see surfers out in the water. The waves weren't coming in very good so they were mostly floating around out there.

Here's a "zoomed" picture of the surfers.

There is our daughter (in the white top) and son (in the blue shirt). We shot this (zoomed) picture from our balcony looking down on them. I thought that was very interesting. We knew they were out walking and would be coming along that way. I called them on the cell phone and told them we would be taking their picture. They stopped there and were looking up at us.

Here's that same area as it was getting dark and the lights were coming on. Sooo pretty.


This picture was taken on the beach side of our hotel.

Mahalo for looking at our pictures. Mahalo means "thank you". The only word we heard more there was Aloha. I'm not sure. Maybe we heard mahalo more.

ALOHA! ! ! I've been gone for over a week but now I'm back home. The header picture was our "home away from home" for a few days.

Our wonderful children took us on a trip to Oahu and Kauai for our 50th wedding anniversary celebration. Our actual anniversary is not until in July, but this was a better time for us to go. I took over 300 pictures on the trip and our daughter took almost that many so I'll be posting pictures the next few days. I haven't downloaded them to the computer yet.

Thanks to the new schedule ahead posting that just became available, I was able to go ahead and post stuff while we were gone.

I've missed visiting other blogs and it will take some time to get caught up. I'm really going to be busy for a long time. Besides all the blogging I'm planning to make a DVD of our trip. So much to do -- so little time.

ALOHA! ! !