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.