Aloha!

Well, we are back from our vacation in Hawaii, which was awesome. I was so sad to come home, especially when we arrived in SLC and it was rainy and a whopping 52 degrees. I wanted to get back on the plane to Oahu. I had been planning this vacation for a while and was so excited to go. It was our first time there. We stayed with my sister Jana and her husband Rob in their apartment in Laie. It was so fun to see them and hang out and also to have Jana drive us all over the island. We would've been so lost w/o her. They were wonderful hosts!

There is so much to share about what we saw and did. I will try not to overwhelm you with pictures (I took almost 500!), so I'll have to narrow them down. Here we go...

Our first day we walked down to Hukilau Beach. It was a little cloudy but still beautiful.

Here is Jacob trying to boogie board

Before ... ...After :)
For lunch we ate at Giovanni's, one of the famous shrimp trucks in Kahuku
garlic shrimp and 2 scoops of rice...mmmm (actually it was really messy b/c you had to peel the shrimp first, and there was a little too much garlic for me)
Rob and Jana

Here we are pretending to drink the juice of this coconut. We tried to eat it, but it was rotten...yuck! Later we found one in the ocean that we took home and ate and it tasted how we remembered a coconut tasting. So don't buy your coconut from Giovanni's!

Jana and Rob live only a 5-minute walk from the temple, so we were able to go do a session. It is beautiful inside and out!

This picture was not taken the night we went, but I wanted pictures of it in brighter light. Isn't it so pretty?

That's the end of our first full day in Hawaii. The day we got there we ate at a yummy restaurant called Phuket Thai. That was our first experience with Thai food and we really liked it. On our drive home to Laie we stopped at Turtle Beach even though it was dark so we could try to spot a turtle. We walked for a little while down the beach and just as I thought it was useless to try and find a turtle in the dark, Jacob found one! I don't have pictures of it though; I'll have to get them from Jana. She said they had never seen a turtle the whole time they've lived there (10 months), so we were really excited. Then we ended up seeing them the whole week!