Swimming with Sea Turtles

 

Terra Hope

 



YES, FINALLY! The long awaited blog is here. Thanks Sarah for the lovely name.

 

We must start from the beginning, but no worries, not the VERY beginning when we popped out of our moms. Just from when we landed in Honolulu, Hawaii. We wanted to add a slide show of all the photos but haven't quite figured out how to do this.

 

For four days we had the luxury to cruise the island of Oahu in our Toyota Corolla rental. We did plenty of touristy gigs such as ride the Pineapple Express Train in the Dole Plantation and ate Pineapple ice cream. Another day we went to the Polynesian Culture Center and had unforgettable experience on first arrival. A heavy rain pounded on our newly purchased red ponchos as we contemplated what to do, where to go in the center. A welcoming, but most importantly dry bus with two smiling girls inside beckoned us onto the bus. Hesitatingly we went aboard and sat down, as we got going Sarah exclaimed out loud, "OH WAIT, where are we going!?" Everyone on the bus turned around to stare at us as the guide said, "to the temple, the temple of Jesus Christ of Latter Day-Saints (can we just stick with simply, Mormon? The other is way to long in my opinion, I had to look it up just to make sure I got it all right. Also, have you noticed how if you take the middle M out of Mormon you get....HAHAHA. I'm really not a mean person but you have to admit that's pretty funny). Sarah looked at me inquisitively and being the "go with the flow" kind of person I am, I shrugged and said why not? The pristine white temple was beautiful but all I could think over and over again was, cult, cult...it's a cult! No sense of humor either, as they herded us into a small room with a small window to look out at the temple (the closest we could get) one of the guides asked us what anyone noticed of a photo. I looked at it, some chairs in an empty immaculate room. I blurted out, "no germs." Once again, every stared..."yeah...I mean it looks so clean!" They promptly ignored this stupid remark and kept talking. Long story short, we eventually made it out of there with an appetite.  We had a disappointing "luau" buffet amongst a hundred other, mainly Asian tourists. In the end, the evening show made it all worth while, Ha: The Breathe of Life was spectacular and action packed for two hours.

 

Granted we visited the island during the rainy season, we did spend some time at the beach.

 

 

 The title of this post is "Swimming with Sea Turtles" because we really did. I don't have photos to prove it but...I swear we did. See the last photo above? It was in a calm, beautiful cove across from this palm tree paradise. Most of the photos I could post of Hawaii are on my windows phone and now that I am in New Zealand I can't use it. Not that I would have used that underwater to capture sea turtles. We are getting there. David, if you are reading this, do you remember the "waterproof" camera you got me as a gift years ago? It isn't waterproof anymore. I think it leaked and started having a seizure and so we weren't able to capture many photos with it. Talk about first world problems, right? Sarah and I keep mentioning this as we both miss our phones and all the cool things we could do with them at home. Not anymore!