Hawaii

Brett and I got to take a much needed vacation immediately upon finishing school in the first of May to Hawaii. We spent 5 days there and loved every minute of it. We used my employee benefits from Marriott and got to stay in 2 fabulous hotels right on the beach.

We decided to brave the public transportation once again, because renting cars is just too dang expensive(Especially since we are under 25 years old)! And paying for parking everywhere you go on top of the rental just adds up way too much. But it turned out really well, we got everywhere we wanted to go, and saved A LOT of money. Public transportation is not too bad once you get the hang of it.

The first two nights we stayed on the West shore of Oahu at the Ko Olina Beach Club Resort by Marriott.

Views from our hotel room on the 15th floor

My good friend from high school Jada Quigley is going to school at BYU Hawaii so she was kind enough to show us some of the more local spots around the island. She took us to a beach close by our resort to go snorkeling, and this was the best snorkeling spot of the trip. There were literally hundreds of fish, big and small, swirling around us and they were all so colorful! Unfortunately we don't have pictures of them, because we forgot our underwater camera on this particular venture. We then went up the the West point of the island to Ka'ena Point State Park, where we played in the waves on the beach. The water is so much powerful than you realize. I got slammed into the sand a couple times, one of which knocked the wind out of me and which I'm pretty sure I cracked a rib. There was a sharp pain every breath I took. It hurt enough that I had Brett give me a blessing when we got to our hotel, and thankfully the next morning it was just sore and tender, but no more sharp pains!

The 2nd place we stayed was at the Marriott right on Waikiki Beach. What a change from the other resort! In Ko Olina we had the lagoons and beaches practically to ourselves, and at Waikiki we were sharing the beach with our thousands of neighbors. Needless to say, we didn't spend much time on Waikiki and ended up going to the North Shore where Jada took us to snorkel Shark's Cove, see Turtle Bay, cliff jump on Waimea Beach, etc... We had a blast and are officially addicted to snorkeling.

We hiked to Diamond Head Peak, which is the top of a volcano where they had lookout points during world war II. This is the view from the top overlooking Waikiki Beach.

Leonard's Bakery is a famous little bakery near Waikiki that makes donuts called Malasadas. It is a donut filled with fruit cream. Our personal favorite was filled with mango cream. We walked a good 2 miles to get there and we loved it so much we walked all the way there again on our last day in Hawaii.

Snorkeling

Giant turtle at Turtle Bay

This shaved ice has ice cream in the bottom and it was amazing!

Cliff jumping... that splash in the water is from me :)

Waimea Beach... I was standing up taking pictures of these waves that were taller than me, and then sprinting away so I wouldn't get pounded by the water. The ocean is so powerful! (If you look closely at the first picture of the waves there is a person inside the wave about to get smashed into the sand.)