Why Hawaii?

A lot of people have asked us why we went to Hawaii. Here's my answer...Do you really need a reason to go to Hawaii? :) I guess it would be fun to celebrate an anniversary or birthday or something, but we just needed a vacation! Since we have been married, every "vacation" was actually a trip to visit family. Even though we love our families dearly, visiting family is not necessarily a vacation. A vacation is suppose to be a get-away to help you relax and take a time-out from your regular life. Every time we talked about taking a "vacation", we never seemed to have the money to do it. Not to mention the fact that I was always pregnant or nursing since 2004.

Soooooo, a year ago I said to myself, "The only way I will ever get to Hawaii is if I MAKE it happen!" I put the kiddos in the car and drove to Barnes and Noble (always a fun place with kids) and bought 'Fodor's Hawaii 2007' book. I highly recommend buying an information book before you go. It was the best thing I did to prepare for this trip. There was a section for each island in Hawaii. After reading a little, I decided Oahu would be the place to go for our first visit. I wanted to go to Pearl Harbor, the Laie Temple, BYU Hawaii, the Polynesian Cultural Center, Hanauma Bay, Diamond Head, Dole Plantation, and oh so many wonderful things to experience. Some day I hope to venture to the other islands too. They look amazing.

So, one day I told Ben we were going to Hawaii in May 2008. He looked a little confused and then said, "Sounds good to me!" The next day he went to the bank and opened our 'Hawaii Fund' account. How fun is that? Ben was awesome for going along with my plan. I work at a gym twice a week for a total of 8 hours. It's not a whole lot-but we saved all of my paychecks for almost a year and it turned into a Hawaii vacation! It has been so fun to work towards this goal. I am so happy we did it!

Thanks to my handy dandy info book, I learned about foods, restaurants, parks, beaches, hotels, activities, prices/costs, Hawaiian music, rental cars, Hawaiian sayings & bumper stickers...pretty much everything you can think of. Since you have already seen photos of the fun places we went to, here are some of the fun things we ate:

Malassadas(type of fried donut)
Mahi Mahi
Humuhumunukunukuapua'a fish (only found in Hawaii)
Pipi Kaula(type of beef jerky)
Lomi Lomi(looks like fresh salsa with chunks of salmon)
Kalua Pork
Haupia(coconut custard)
Taro rolls (purple bread rolls)
Shave Ice w/ ice cream(not 'shaved ice')
and amazing shrimp!

Can you tell we are still having Hawaii withdrawal? Anyway, just in case I end up printing my blog entries some day, I wanted to write a little journal entry to go along with the fun pictures.