Hawaii!!!

For Christmas this year we decided to go somewhere warm (again) and this time chose Hawaii. Elisa, Kathy, Nicole and I went to the Big Island which I'd never been to before. I'll let most the pictures do the talking, but let's just say that Hawaii + Christmas - Snow at home = HEAVEN!!

Here is where we stayed. It was a friend from my work's parent's condo located on a golf course about 10 minutes from the beach. Excellent. This is the view from our balcony.


Day 1 we started at the beach, but it was cloudy so we decided to go up to Waipi'o Valley lookout. The road ends for cars without 4 wheel drive, but you can hike down the 25% grade to the bottom. Other people were doing it so we figured we might as well. So we headed on down (without water or anything). As we made our way down to the valley we realized that the climb back up was going to be STEEP! Luckily for us we left at the right time and some nice locals put us in the back of their truck (with their trash and beer bottles) and we made it up to the top in 5 minutes. Here are some pictures:

Us 4 at the top (note the ocean below is where we are headed)

Nicole kicking the black sand around....


Look at those hops!!

Our ride up the mountain


Elisa and Kathy enjoying the ride......


And these 2 little girls talked to us the whole way up...

Day 2 was cloudy again!! Seriously what is up with the clouds in Hawaii? So we decided to make the all day trek to see the Volcano. On our way down to the volcano we stopped at Akaka Falls. They are 420 ft free fall and pretty awesome.

On our way down the trail they had these awesome Tarzan like trees (Me, Nicole, Elisa)

Me taking a swing.......

Akaka Falls



Next stop the Volcano. Now it wasn't flowing red lava into the ocean, but it was erupting and it was fascinating! Seriously fascinating.


About to walk into an old lava tube that the lava created and flowed through to the ocean. Note all the vegetation.


Some of you may recognized these cliffs from the Temple video




And the most recent flow of lava just took over the road just a little over a year ago.


Me sitting and standing on the newest land on earth!!! This land is much, much YOUNGER than I am.


Beautiful sunset as we left the volcano


The next day we had a really full day. We went whale watching, to the beach and to a luau.

First off we went whale watching. We saw a TON of whales and dolphins. It was awesome. I took a few videos of them as they are really hard to get a photograph of.





Here we are boogie boarding at the beach. I hadn't every tried boogie boarding and it was really fun. I got the hang of it this day although I did lose the bottom of my swimsuit but was able to recover underwater. I wore my board shorts after that.



And my best look so far.......LOL!

Then we were off to the luau where they actually cooked our pig in the ground. It was really cool (and kind of gross) watching them pull it out and then feeding it to us.


Nicole took this picture of the 3 of us doing the important things while in Hawaii. Updating our facebook statuses.


Besides the beach the favorite thing we did was go ziplining and off roading through the rainforest. It was awesome. It felt like 2 local kids took us up in their truck and showed us the island. We went on 8 different ziplines and just laughed and had fun. Kathy couldn't come with us because of her elbow, but we had so much fun.

Here we are standing outside our off-road vehicle. They were CRAZY drivers!!!


A couple of pictures of us in our ziplining gear.




and here is a video of one of the ziplines (as I went over a huge waterfall!).