Five on Friday: Hawaii

Happy Friday to All! Yay the weekend is here!!  And seeing that it's Friday I am linking with Amy at Love Made my Home for Five on Friday. 

For my 5 today I was inspired by my scrapbooks when I was working on them recently. I was looking through my travel album and browsing through some pages of when my hubby and I took a cruise in Hawaii. 

My son was 8 at the time and my daughter only 2&1/2, so it was our first big trip that we took with no kids (nice romantic getaway). My sis-in-law's family was doing a reunion on a cruise through Hawaii and my bro&sis-in-law asked if we wanted to come along and have a nice getaway. I know several of my SIL's immediate family pretty well and just love them so it was a very comfortable situation so we jumped at the chance!  My hubby has a great sense of humor and lives to joke and tease and he came up with the idea to do matching t-shirts and naming our trip. He & I also worked on funny names for everybody for the backs of their shirts (you can see us all in blue shirts above). So our trip was the Tiki Tour 2009. Some of the funny names we came up with for folks were: poi boy, pineapple princess, speedo inspector (for a single gal) Lol - and my hubby is a fair redhead & sunburns easy and made good fun of himself and he put 'mister blister' on the back of  his shirt. 

The cruise was a really nice way to do Hawaii as we were able to cover many islands in an efficient and easy way. This allowed us to have many different wonderful experiences and see a lot! And the cruise was so wonderfully organized at handling the activities we had signed up for at each island. So here's 5 great experiences we had in Hawaii:

When you're in Hawaii of course you want to do a luau! It's fun for the food (wonderful pig roast) and great entertainment. It's also a wonderful way to learn more about Hawaiian culture.

We did the Molokini snorkel excursion. I have had the fortune of snorkeling in Mexico too and it was one of the most fun and amazing things I'd ever done. My hubby didn't have a lot of snorkeling experience so I was so excited to share this with him. You can see in the photos on the right we had fun with an underwater camera, and in the top pic I even dove underwater and was showing my hubby the way! Lol If you look at what I wrote below the bottom pic on the right you can see I like to make fun of us too. 

In Kauai we did an ATV mud buggy tour. My hubby talked me into this one and I wasn't sure what I thought about it. It was truly one of the craziest things I've ever done! It was quite adventurous as we had to drive through dark caves and go through huge pond like puddles full of muddy water that would splash so big over us we coudn't see. As the passenger it was my job to keep cleaning my hubby's goggles (the driver) so he could see. We would go down large hills with hairpin turns - that's why we had to wear helmets as sometimes people flip over!! Quite adventurous for me and my hubby absolutely LOVED it and was so proud I was a good sport. This island is where they filmed movie Jurassic Park and you can see they like to give folks a funny experience and in bottom right pic the guy running the program took a photo of our ATV looking like a plastic dinosaur is chasing us. I had to wash my hair 3 times to get all the mud out by the way!!!

My hubby and I love golf and golfed on 3 different islands during the course of our trip. I put the photos from this one of us at the Kona country club course, as there were huge wild turkeys all over the course! And that was fitting to me as I birdied one hole! Which if you play golf you know is a good thing! Lol

And we couldn't go to Hawaii and not visit Pearl Harbor and visit the historical USS Arizona memorial. They ferried us over to the memorial and, out of respect, everyone walks around in complete silence as it's the grave site of so many men who lost their lives on Dec. 7, 1941 during a surprise Japanese attack. They have a large memorial wall with all the names of the men. If you look at the photos on the right you can see that there's still oil leaking out of the Arizona into the water after 70 years. They refer to it as "Arizona's Tears".  A truly moving experience and an important landmark to remember in our history.

We also did a really neat helicopter tour over a volcano, but I didn't include that in the 5 as my hubby got quite motion sick and didn't enjoy it as much as I did - poor guy. 

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend!! xo