The days we have almost no photos of.

[we have awesome puppy-sitters. You can't tell how happy our pups actually are. They love dress up and they love going to our puppy-sitter's house. If you need a good sitter, let me know and I'll give you their name!]

Thursday:

Another morning we watched the waves. When you get up at 5 or 6 am you can hear the waves really well because there are no people or cars. It's easy to get out of bed for the beautiful views and noises. It's also easier to wake up at 6:30 Hawaii time when its 11:30 am in Dallas time. I feel so well rested!  

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We went snorkeling. I wish I had pictures for you, it was beautiful. There were so many colorful fish! We got some video, so if we're able to pull photos off of it, we will!

I really want to show you photos of this, so I hope to update this post next week sometime!

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Ryan stayed home to rest his back and I stayed home to write. We did way too much the day before and I needed to write about it and nap. And a few hours of TV.

The Covingtons went boogie boarding for 3 hours. Then we all went to happy hour and we had a huge plate of nachos. It was awesome. And by awesome, I mean delicious. 

[a fun happy hour spot]

[nachos!]

[sunset]

We came home and watched the sun set. We met a funny fellow named Everett He told us about a delicious restaurant on the Big Island that we needed to try that had a macadamia nut pie that was "almost, almost as good as sex."

[our new friend]

Note: our friends tried it and disagreed.

[pie]

He talked about how much he loved crackers with his chowder.

He also told us he was on his 5th glass of alcohol, and he was being quite generous with his glass sizes.

...........

Then we played Mini Golf. I would love to say I killed it at mini golf. And I did on the first 9. But not on the back 9.  Amberlee came back to win by 3 points by the end of the game. We'll have to have a rematch!

There was one hole where Jonathan and Amberlee both lost their goofballs multiple times in the water trap. I couldn't stop laughing!

[Mini-golf]

We ate dinner at 9 or something that night. It was delicious!

[Dinner: salmon and salad]

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Then Ryan and I stayed up to watch We Are The Millers. Interesting movie. We finally fell asleep.

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Friday:

We rolled out of bed and ate breakfast at a little cafe we found last week on Sunday. 

It was, as expected, delicious again.

On the way home we saw a rainbow.

The healthy people (Ryan, Jonathan, and Amberlee) went on a walk. I stayed home to sit on my bum and write. 

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When we shopped at Costco early on we got snack foods: popcorn, chips and salsa, grapes, and crystal lite iced tea. 

We finished the salsa in 2 days and had to go back for more!

The popcorn went fast too. 

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I found this photo on Pinterest and immediately I wanted to do it!

[tubing as it looks on Pinterest, note it looks quite different in reality]

Look how fun and relaxing that looks! 

Mountain cave tubbing. Another activity I don't have photos for Thurs

until we pull them off the GoPro underwater camera.  

Around the 1850s they built all these irrigation canals to help grow sugar cane. The crop did really well until the 1960s when Hawaii became a state and got labor laws, making it much more expensive to produce sugar. The sugar industry pretty much moved to Central and South America.

Now there's just these empty canals that go through caves that you can ride down the mountain.

They give you gloves to touch the walls of the caves. Helmets with lights on them. 

They made us go through the last cave with zero light, which was pretty awesome.

But just know if you sign up for the "3 hour" trip, you spend only 45 minutes on the river, about 45 minutes on bumpy roads and taking photos, 30 minutes getting a helmet and listening to rules, and 60 minutes making your own picnic lunch and feeding cats your leftovers.

I fed the cat my water out of the water bottle cap. It drank the water immediately. It was a skinny cat but not too skinny. Apparently it hangs out at the picnic tables every day and gets plenty of table scraps. Sorry I have no photos for you, but you're probably already picturing a cat in your head that looks exactly like my mountain cat. 

Again, if we get some cool photos I'll share them!

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We ate dinner at The Beach House. The food was delicious, but the sunset was the best. We really enjoyed it!

[another pretty sunset]

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Then, to walk off the large amount of food in our tummies, we played mini golf again. I played so poorly! Clearly I do way better before a big meal. Really, I think I just do better when I put less pressure on myself and relax.

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Then we played another game of Sorry! We learned there's a fun way to play it with strategy instead of just luck. You each have 5 cards and play them one at a time (drawing a new card when you play one). It was quite fun!

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Again, we fell asleep. This time I didn't want to go to bed because I didn't want to wake up the next day and leave.