Aloha 4-5

Day 4 was kind of a lazy day - we spent the morning eating breakfast with this little guy at a cafe then wandered through the ironman exhibits. We got some new shoes (thanks Gaga and Papa!) and some samples of other goodies. We went to the grocery store and then got Kim and Rob at the airport. We had a nice Italian dinner together.

The next day was Ironman. Here are some shots I took. None of them are of Papa, you can go over to Kim's blog to see some awesome pics of the trip and the race.

 

Aloha 3

Day 3 in Kona, Todd, Debbie and I headed out on an adventure. We drove to the volcano! On the way, we stopped at The Coffee Shack - check out the view! We thought this restaurant was so cute, we went back and ate there a few days later with Kim and Rob. (Gecko pictures to come!)

 

After grabbing a coffee, we headed south to the Black Sand beach. Apparently, there are turtles aplenty there, crawling up your legs, giving you kisses, letting you ride them, etc.....but we didn't see any. But it was still lovely. 

 We arrived at the volcano after stopping for lunch in Volcano at a cute little wood-fired oven place. Todd had a pizza, Debbie had a chicken sandwich, and I had a prociutto and mozzarella sandwich. YUM. Here is a picture of the volcano!

This is a picture of one of the paths we walked down. We had a good hike while we were there:

Here I am, about to skype the kids from the volcano (awesome!)

After the volcano close-up, we drove down to the coast to see where the lava had gone into the ocean and over the road. It was pretty cool. There was a lava bridge-type thing, and a Japanese couple that wanted Todd to talk "full body" pictures of them.  

On the way back up the mountain, we stopped at the lava tube, which was a cool....um....lava tube.

That night, we ate at a great place where I had my best meal of the week! It was a portabello mushroom with couscous and feta and asparagus. YUM to the O.

Aloha 2.2

The rest of our second day was spent visiting the Puako Petroglyph park. A very interesting place. We parked in a parking lot by one of the resorts and hiked through a weird little forest that we started calling the "Enchanted Forest." We saw about 20-30 petroglyphs, hiked until we thought we might be done, and then want back to the car. When we got there, we read in the book that there were 3,000 petroglyphs on the site. Oops, we missed a few!

 

Aloha Day 2.1

We started our day on Tuesday with a walk downtown and a jog back to the condo, stopping at Lava Java's for a cinamon bun. After showering, etc. we set out to Hawi, in the northern part of the island. Once there, we ate at Bamboo Restaurant. It was very yummy. We had potstickers (which I ate and had peanuts in it, and even though I freaked out a lot, I didn't go into anaphalaxis, so maybe I'm not allergic to peanuts!?) and then fish sandwiches and fish quesadillas. Yummy.

 After lunch, we wandered through the local shops, posed by an alien, and then drove up to Pololu.

Here there was a long hike down the mountain to a black sand beach. Todd and I went about halfway down to get a better picture of the beach. It was a tough hike back up, but very pretty! 

 After our hike, we did a drive-by shooting of the King Kamehameha statue. It was much smaller than I anticipated:

Kona, day 1

We arrived in Kona on Monday late afternoon. The airport on the Big Island is outdoors, which was cool. Here is a photo from the outside of the airport:

The next few pictures are of the view from our lanai. We stayed a little south of the main downtown of Kailua-Kona. When we arrived, we dropped our stuff off and then headed to the grocery store. I may or may not have had a confrontation with the checkout girl, hard to say what really happened with my lack of sleep. We grabbed some goodies to eat for dinner and then hit the sheets. We were tired.  

Kids and adults would surf outside of our window daily, all day long from sunrise to sunset. 
A lot of the island is made up of black lava rock, and people will often take the white stones from the beach and spell out words on the rocks. No idea what this meant, but it was outside our window the whole week:

Wednesday Weigh-in and Aloha!!

Loss: -2.6
Total loss: -53
Feeling: Surprised.

We got back from Hawaii on Monday. I wasn't expecting to lose that much weight, but knew that we had walked a TON while there. I had also gained the week prior, so I knew some of that would come off. So, there ya go.

I have so much to tell you about our trip to Hawaii but I can't find the time to upload pictures and tell you all about it. I will. In time. Be patient, little ones.