Kauai Trip

Below are some pictures, videos and stories from the Kauai trip, we made a couple of months ago.

This is us posing in front of the famous Bali Hai mountain. Or at least that is what the mountain was called in the film "South Pacific," which was filmed on Kauai.

We spent a lot of time swimming around and harassing the fish. The underwater camera came in pretty handy.

The underwater camera was definitely a worthwhile purchase for the trip. We discovered that still shots of fish were a little hard, but videos worked pretty well. 

After a lot of practice I was finally able to swim down deep enough to see fish. 

We also spent a little bit of time on land checking out the different things Kauai has to offer, including mini-golf, Kauai's "grand canyon," and a few other things.  

The heights kinda freaked me out, so I didn't spend much time near the edge, but that just meant I could take more pictures of Sean.

My intrepid husband. 

Kilauea Lighthouse

I totally crushed Sean at mini-golf. It was a little botanical garden mini-golf course, and we had a lot of fun. 

More mini-golf. There were a lot of water hazards in this course. We both ended up fishing our balls out of the water a couple times. 

Sea Turtle! We almost ran into a couple of these guys while we were snorkeling, they just showed up out of nowhere. 

Blowhole. Rumor has it that there was once an even bigger one that shot water so high it caused salt water to land on a farmer's field, so he hired someone to blow it up with dynamite. I don't know if it is true, but there was a pretty big crater near where the blowhole was. 

The guide book called this secret beach. I guess it was secluded enough that people thought they could get away with being nude. It was kind of awkward. But we could see the Kilauea lighthouse from the other side, which was cool. 

The westernmost bookstore of the United States. A pretty cool place. There's Sean parked in the front in the car we had. The upgraded us for free to a Mustang Convertible. I think it's because they were out of the other ones.

Spartan Race

Yes yes, don't have a heart attack, but we are finally posting on the blog again after over a year. 

Yesterday we participated in the Spartan Race out here. We completed the race, which was a 5k sprinkled with sadistic obstacle events, in about an hour and forty minutes. In the end we all had to recognize the fact that we hadn't anticipated wanting to walk as much as we did between the obstacles, but that it was ok, because it's harder to run when your clothing and shoes are saturated in mud.

This is our team. Sean and I, and our friends Will and Hope Bos.

 I don't remember all of the events, but the race went something like this:

-four foot wall

-crawl under a wall

-small mud puddle

-run upstream for a couple meters (stomach high water)

-evil uphill run (maybe half a mile)

-cargo net climb

-evil downhill turning run through trees

-five foot wall

-small run

-six foot wall

-mud obstacle under barbed wire, and through thick mud. (we almost lost our shoes in the mud at this point.)

-seven foot wall

-tire carry and pull

-rock chain drag thing

-smallish run

-eight foot wall

-cement carry thing and five burpees

-Sand bag carry (Hope and I both carried the men's size bags)

-Sideways wall climb

-nine foot wall

-long mud crawl (This was, I think, the worst event. The barbed wire was loose and we had to hold it up for each other, they were spraying us with salt water out of a fire hose, and my bib number pin stabbed me in the chest.)

-monkey bars

-rope climb (None in our group were able to do it, Sean and I tried and were rewarded with a chance to stand in mud up to our armpits, so we ended up doing 30 burpees instead. Mine were pretty pathetic.)

-Slanted wall rope climb (Without the help of the Bos's and Sean I would not have made it over this one, and would have had to do another 30 burpees)

-Jump over fire pit

-Run to finish through chute while being beaten by guys with pugle sticks. 

I think that is pretty much it, although the order could be off. In the end we looked like this:

Even though it is hard to tell, my shirt was originally green, and Sean's was yellow. Even our medals were already covered in mud as soon as we got them. 

 Even though it was quite challenging and I had to have help on a lot of events, mostly the higher walls, we had a lot of fun and we are all planning on participating next year. 

The fire and gladiator section were the last two events.

The first hill, right after running through the river and I was thinking,"What have I gotten myself into. I don't think Sean was as tired as I was. 

I used the guys sandbag because I didn't want to wait for a girls one. It wasn't too bad. 

The Sandbag carry. Not the most difficult event. 

  

             July Adventures

We Live Here:

I still can't believe that we live in this place. Some times it still shocks me. It's very beautiful. We went to ward camp for a day and hung out on the beach for a little while before coming back in to have a tasty pot-luck dinner. Sean finally got to see what happens when I eat meat. I accidentally got a big chunk of chicken in my mouth somehow... and gagged pretty good. He still laughs about it. 

Sean did a little dance on the beach while the waves sank him into the sand. 

 Yup, still can't believe that we live here. We had a lot of fun that day. That's not me in the picture, I just wanted to show the view.

 This is still us playing on the beach. You can't really see it, but when I was playing I turfed my chin into the sand at the bottom and got a little bruise. I guess I won't sink head first into the water when I can't see the bottom.

On the Independence Day we went to Hickam Harbor to see the fireworks over the bay. It was one of the biggest shows I've ever seen with fireworks that spelled out USA, and made smiley faces. David Cook performed there before the show, but he was only ok. 

Many of you may know of our manatee child. This is him in his new apartment, which is the little cupboard in our chest of drawers. He's just getting ready for bed. And yes... our stuffed animal has a stuffed animal. We just like to make jokes with him.

I've been talking up polo, but here is real photo evidence. That's me, practicing with an arena ball riding my instructors horse Billy. 

Although Billy always requires a lot of encouragement to move, he was having an especially rough day with the flies, and for some reason that made him not want to make right turns. I guess he was trying to see what he could get away with, with me he can get away with about anything. This is him and I having a little fight when he wouldn't turn right. 

 Our Stake did a 5k with over 100 people, in fact there were 100 more this year than last year. This is Sean pre-race standing with our friend John. 

 Sean pre-race with flag bandana and Captain America shorts.

Post Race with  our participant ribbons. I was especially happy that they were green! Sean beat me by about 6 minutes, but I did better than I expected in just about the longest distance I've ever run. And look... we actually got someone to take a picture of us together.

 

 Muanawili Falls hike... I think. One of the hardest things here is getting used to the names of places, Google found this name for me, I had already forgotten what it was called.

 We don't know these people, but they didn't follow the warning below.

 Hmm... Think I'll stay away from the flesh eating bacteria water.

 Humidity makes my hair funny.

 Our Manatee made the hike in my backpack.

 Sean catching a gecko that got into our apartment. Don't worry, I hear it is a common occurrence. We named him Slurpy, which is what I name all lost animals.

 Can you spot Slurpy?

 Huge Mosquitoes. I think they have to take phlebotomy classes before moving to Hawaii. The bites itch unceasingly. I got 17 on my legs our first week here while I was looking for houses.

 On the Manoa Cliff Trail hike we found a bamboo forest. The clicking noise they made in the wind was both cool, and eery.

 I totally whomped on Sean when we played marbles one night as a date. That's our tablecloth we're playing on.

If you noticed that we're not together in any of our pictures, it's not because we don't like each other. It's because there was no one else there to take a picture, we're working on that.

We've had all kinds of adventures since moving here, some of which have indeed involved the beach. Unfortunately, we are not brave enough to bring our camera to the beach, so you'll have to wait on pictures of those. But we did do some cliff jumping at Waimea Bay, which was fun. Sean jumped off the big rock like all of the natives, and I tried the little one. The next time we jump off cliffs we'll have to bring a camera.