Hawaii Vacation - Day 1

In celebration of our 10-year anniversary this past year, Josh and I decided to take a vacation to Hawaii.  Josh used to live there, and he's been wanting to go back forever, so we finally made it happen!  After the kids got out on the last day of school, we headed down to St. George to Josh's parents house.  They were kind enough to watch all of the boys while we went.  I had never been away from any of the kids for longer than a couple of days, so I was a little nervous to leave them, especially little Quinn!  We spent the night, and the next day Josh's dad drove us to the airport in Las Vegas.  We flew out, had a layover in San Francisco, and arrived in Honolulu that night around 10:00pm.  Hawaii is four hours behind Utah time, so it was feeling really late to us!  We picked up our rental car and headed to our hotel.  We stayed in Waikiki, mainly because it was the cheapest hotel we could find.  The hotel ended up being really nice.  The only bad part was the $18/night parking fee.  Yikes!  One neat thing about the hotel was that all of the shampoos, lotions, etc. were pineapple and papaya scented.  Kind of a neat touch! :)

The next morning we walked to a nearby cafe for breakfast.  They had coconut syrup for the pancakes that was SO good!  I love anything coconut and vowed I would come home and figure out how to make it. :)   Josh had tropical muesli and eggs with corned beef hash topped with fried bananas.  It was fun having breakfast with a tropical twist. :) After breakfast we had fun seeing all the neat flowers and birds as we walked back to our hotel.

The hibiscus flowers were so pretty.

These lilly-pads were really cool.  I don't think I had ever seen real lilly-pads with flowers on them before!

The trees were so cool there!  

After we got back, we got the car and headed out to find a farmers' market.  The one we were originally looking for was supposed to be at an elementary school, but when we got there, it wasn't there that day for some reason.  I took a picture of the elementary school because it was neat to see how different their schools are over there.  Each classroom opens to the outdoors rather than being all indoors like they are here.

After some research and asking around we finally found a farmer's market that was going on.  We bought tons of fresh fruit so that we could use it as part of our breakfasts throughout the week.  We got fresh papayas, mangos, apple bananas, and a giant avocado!  While we were there we got some lunch from a local vendor.  We got laualau (pork wrapped in taro leaves - SO good!) and kalua pork.

Our big stack of fresh tropical fruit.

The papayas were my favorite! Yum!  I wish I could have brought some home.

We also stopped by a gas station at one point and Josh got us some Spam Musubis to try.  He used to eat them when he lived here.  They are pretty much a slice of Spam topping a rectangle of rice and wrapped in nori.  Sort of like a big Spam sushi.  They were actually really good!  They sell them all over the place over there.

Afterwards we found a grocery store and stocked up on foods that we could eat for breakfast so we didn't have to go out for breakfast anymore while we were there to save money.  After we got home, we decided to take a walk down to the beach.  Our hotel was within walking distance to Waikiki beach.

Standing by some bamboo trees at a nearby park.

After the beach, we headed back to town to eat dinner.  We decided to try a restaurant called Cheeseburger Waikiki, mainly because it was close to our hotel.  It ended up being really good.  I had some amazing coconut shrimp that came with sweet potato fries.  Josh had Kalua Pork nachos.