Brian and I took a trip to Hawaii (Big Island) for three nights. A lot of it was a logistical nightmare… there was a cancelled snorkeling tour and we lost our go pro. Midday during one of the days I lost it and sobbed in the hotel for an hour. I will eventually post about it, but I’m just not feeling up for rehashing it yet. So here’s a quick happier update from after that trip.
Brian and I hosted a few friends for Christmas brunch. We had waffles, quiche, fresh fruit, and POG (passionfruit orange guava) mimosas. We then played ticket to ride, a game where we compete to build train routes. My shirt says “Deck the palms” and it’s from Brian’s parents, I love it!
We had a phone call with Brian’s family, including his aunt and uncle who are visiting his parents currently and of course his parents and his sister.
Then we went to pick up my parents from the airport! I didn’t get a picture of them in their leis, I’m kinda upset with myself, but Dad has one. I got a very special Pierogi delivery, I AM SO HAPPY! They are loving Hawaii. Dad joined me the next morning for a sunrise walk and met a couple of my “sunrise walk usuals” friends.
Another friend who visited previously, Erin, had a 9 hour layover between Australia and NYC. So we all got some breakfast, sunshine, and lunch together.
Merry Christmas from us to you! Joy to the world, the Lord has come!
I might not post every time I re-do hikes, but we wanted to try to get to a sunrise on this hike. It was pretty cloudy and there was a wall of rain coming at us, but we’re glad we did it. This was Jess’ first time so I told her to come back.
We must’ve seen at least six rainbows this day from all the rain.
This was by far my favorite Hawaii hike so far. I almost got too nervous to do it based on the reviews… many say it’s not well marked, and you lose GPS, and it’s muddy… but I decided with Brian and Jess along the worst that happens is we get a little lost and use our heads to get back home. I’m SO happy we chose to do it. The pictures don’t do it justice, but the waterfalls were amazing, and the journey there was awesome.
You start by having to go across a manmade concrete ditch, that was actually a bit tricky but do able obviously. There was a lot of downed trees and brush, but there were pink tree tags often enough you can find your way. Pretty quickly you get to this amazing bamboo forest.
Eventually you get to a split and can go left or right. Definitely go left. Somewhere along the way you hit a pine forest.
I was joking with them that this is nature’s botanical garden. Finally, we started getting close to a stream and more jungle-y scenery. The path had a lot of mud puddles. I wear spikes on my shoes, it makes me so much faster. They are supposed to go on boots, but I wear them on these because they clean easier. I just need to start wearing my boots even though they won’t stay clean.
Anyway, after only about 620ft elevation and a mile (which in Hawaiian mud turns out to take 50 minutes, seriously! It’s crazy) you get to this AMAZING waterfall. The pictures don’t do the height justice until you put a person in them.
These were sooo beautiful. And the sound they make!! So peaceful. There’s also a cave you can explore, but I thought I heard that it can be disrespectful to the land, but maybe I’m making that up. Anyway, you had to kinda rope climb to get up, and I wasn’t up for it. So I let Brian and Jess explore a bit and just snapped away.
This was such a great hike. There was parking at the pali lookout. Barely any steep scrambling. With my crampons I felt very safe. It took us a little under 2 hours, which isn’t overwhelming but not easy either. The navigating by following the flagged trees was easy. Bamboo forest was beautiful. I can’t say enough good about this hike. Love love loved it.
KOSC hosted a cookie swap. This has to be one of my favorite Christmas events. So many cookies and so little baking. I made Chewy Ginger Molasses Cookies. They taste delicious, but the texture is not quite right. I am also trying to figure out my oven, it doesn’t quite bake right with cookies on both shelves… so I think I’ll just start cooking one sheet at a time.
I’m not often in pictures so one of the members I’ve taught to take pictures took my camera and took one of me. It’s really dark in the house and at night, so things look a bit blurry due to my camera settings I have to work with.
The sugar cookies come from another sub spouse who moonlighted doing cookie baking for the White House Christmas (I think I mentioned she came over to bake cookies for homecoming). She’s a great decorator! She actually baked them at my house again because her oven part didn’t come in.
Anyway, I wasn’t originally going to go to this. I had another holiday party schedules at the same time with the submarine officer spouse group. I had to pay $40 to reserve my spot, and it it’s one of those fancy parties at the Camp Smith Sunset Lanai. I really only wanted to go to experience the Sunset Lanai… everything else I was not looking forward to. Dressing up, driving far, being there for a long time, having to lie about how Brian’s doing (word gets around and it can get around to the wrong people)… the cookie swap was way more my style. Less people, less being fake, way more fun and cookies. I do not regret making that decision, but it felt hard to make at the time.
I also tried this garlic bread tree recipe. I think display was 10/10. Taste was 7/10. Needed more garlic and the bread was meh. Didn’t stop me from eating it for breakfast the next morning. Also pictured is my friend’s spinach dip recipe which is my fave and I request all the time.
Glad to be around people I’m comfortable with in a comfortable outfit and get to take a container full of a million types of cookies. Win win.
I bought tickets for us to go do an after hours tour of the Honolulu Zoo, but turns out Brian wouldn’t be home, so I brought a friend instead. This tour books out a few months in advance, and it lives up to the hype! It was super cheap, I think $10 for each of us as members. Our tour guide was great, she was very knowledgable and told great stories about the animals. We saw almost every animal that we stopped at, and a couple that she claims “are NEVER out” (I believe she was authentic about it, but it was funny that it happened to a couple.) One was the lizards and the other was the Aardvark.
A couple story highlights; the zebra and the giraffe are BFFs, the Rhinos were matched in hopes of mating but she didn’t think he was man enough, the male lion died of COVID, so the female now does the territorial scouting.
Loved this guy and it’s shame he doesn’t keep his window clean.
This guy was mesmerizing swinging around… apparently doing a territorial dance because there was a large man in our group.
We had a really great time doing this and I can see why it sells out! 10/10 would recommend this behind the scenes tour. There was only 15 of us, including three kids, so it was really easy to take pictures and never felt crowded.
The short way to Lanikai Pillbox is right outside my door and takes all of 25 minutes, but includes a couple sections of rock scrambling. A friend, Jess, is past her due date and wanted to go for a hike to try to move things along. I was nervous about her doing the steep fast way, and have been wanting to do the back way, so we went for it.
To get to the back way, I can actually park on the other side of my complex and walk. (This comes in handy later).
The views from the back are incredible… dare I say better than the short way.
You’re set further back from the ocean, so you can see the bay a bit better. You also climb higher (maybe?) at some points… essentially we went over three-ish peaks to get to the ocean. You can see we’re kinda starting that section after doing a decent amount of climbing to get there in the first place.
You also get a really great view of Bellows and Waimanalo
And view after beautiful view of the mokes along the way.
If these pictures seem blurrier than normal… it’s because my lens stopped talking to my camera. I didn’t know that’s what was happening until I troubleshooted at home. I switched between manually focusing and trying to get the camera to do it. Oh well, good excuse to do it again. Here we are finally coming up to the first pillbox.
That took an hour to get there (It felt like two if I’m being honest), so we decided that we should go the “short” way home. It was actually the perfect amount of wet… it wasn’t super dry and slippery and it wasn’t muddy and slick. I’m really glad we picked that way. Then we walked through my complex back to the other side to get my car.
It’s kinda hard to get on the top of the pillbox… and by that I mean it’s hard for anyone scared of heights… but Jess did it so I figured out a way. It is actually kinda hard logistically to get up, takes a couple big steps. Anyway! This was my first time to the second pillbox and first time on it… lots of firsts for me this hike!
This is on our way back down.
And of course I had to get a selfie with the fantastic new signs on completion.
10/10 recommend doing the hike this way… if you have the in and can get into the fabulous community somehow. The views of the mokes just keep getting better and better… it feels more like a hike… you hit both pillboxes, it’s so much quieter (we saw two people until we got to the pillbox).
Taken from Wikipedia: Diamond Head is a volcanic tuff cone on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu and known to Hawaiians as Lēʻahi (pronounced [leːˈʔɐhi]). The Hawaiian name is most likely derived from lae (browridge, promontory) plus ʻahi (tuna) because the shape of the ridgeline resembles the shape of a tuna‘s dorsal fin.[3] Its English name was given by British sailors in the 19th century, who mistook calcite crystals on the adjacent beach for diamonds.
This hike is ridiculously popular, so it was on my list to just check off. I planned to do it with people from KOSC… but no one ended up committing… so I just did it with my thousand best tourist friends(i.e., alone). (Brian is gone, again…not for long). Thankfully, I don’t have to pay anything because of Kama’aina (I have a Hawaii license). Normally it’s $10 to park, and $5 to hike. They probably could charge $50 to park and there’d be lines… however, when I went (7:45a on a Saturday), it only took me ten minutes waiting to get a spot (there are attendants who do a great job monitoring). There’s a lot of turnover, so it goes quickly. I can imagine this being horrendous in prime tourist season.
The trail starts out nice and paved, and then it’s uneven and paved. Some parts of the unevenness get dirty, but truly most of it is paved. The elevation gain is 500ft. It starts in switchbacks and then there are a couple sets of stairs and a tunnel to get you to the finish.
Someone was BLASTING Christmas music on the way up. And I immediately understood why this hike gets a bad rap, and why I love my in the jungle ones. Anyway, in the photo above you can see the sheer amount of people that come. You can also see the bunker hidden in the dirt. There are a lot of history plaques and an audio tour, should you chose (I didn’t…)
The views were pretty cool.
You can see a couple more bunkers.
I’d put this on par with Haunama bay. Should you do it once? Probably. Is it a complete tourist attraction? Yes. It is an easy “hike” to take not in shape people on to see a decent view? Definitely. Am I worried about my car getting broken into? Not so much. Are there are million other hikes I’d recommend over this one? Absolutely.
The lady in red Hawaiian shirt is a 92 year old survivor of the attacks on Pearl Harbor. She lived on MCBH during the attacks and told her story of her experiences on that day. Her name is Joedy Adams, she was 12 at the time. You can hear a rendition of her full story here. Her dad told her and her mom to escape to Honolulu. When they got to Honolulu, they crashed their car trying to avoid a bus driving on the wrong side of the road (reportedly driven by a Japanese man). They knocked on the door of the house where they crashed, and it was a Navy officer’s house. He had no idea it was happening, so he ran out the door to drive to Pearl. Crazy how they couldn’t hear it happening in Honolulu. At one point on the ride over, they pulled over because of a plane flying overhead and hid. The plane was shooting down the middle of the road. It took her dad five days to be able to communicate with them. When they finally got to go home, they drove at night without headlights to stay hidden. Her mom had to sit out the passenger side hanging her hand over the side driving around the cliffs to make sure they were still on the road.
It was cool to hear her talk. She was still very with it!
She also told a story about a spy living in her house. A friend told him this was discredited, but she still tells it like it’s true, and that no one really corrects her because it was her rendition of the day.
Oh, “Talk Story” is a common phrase in Hawaii, and it basically means to “shoot the shit” most of the time, or times like this a more specific “chat” gathering.
KOSC had a Holiday party and they advised us to dress “festive”. Well, knowing this group I thought it’d be a little more casual, so I wore my favorite Christmas onesie (which, for the record, is a bit warm for Hawaii). Anyway, it’s like 60% people dressed really nice, and 39% dressed in ugly sweater-ish type attire, and I was like… the most outlandish. But I received so many compliments! And everyone enjoyed my festive-ness.
Anyway, I brought a cool ornament from Micromahalo . The blue pieces are micro plastic from the beach.
The host was the base CO and his wife, so you can imagine their house is huge. They live in the house that Eisenhower stayed in after WWII. Apparently it’s called the “Kane’ohe Bay White House” but I can’t find much about it online beside this. You can see it has a massive open space for hosting.
It also has a gorgeous view of the ocean as you can imagine. The husbands were our bartenders. It was a truly fantastic night. We had what we call “mando fun”, mandatory fun, meaning you’re all going to take a picture inside this frame or else.
We also collected a lot of toys for a toys-4-tots type program on base.
It was such a fun night, and I’d love to keep doing ornament exchanges past Hawaii. No stress, no swapping… just raffle style. It’s hard to see, but I got a santa playing a ukelele riding a sea turtle, and that’s PERFECT.
I live by arguable the most popular hike on Oahu called the Lanikai Pillbox hike. This causes all sorts of disturbances for our neighborhood. For one, the path used to start at a different point essentially up someone’s driveway, but it was moved to start right off the road instead. However, AllTrails (A popular trail mapping app) had outdated data. So I emailed them a few times to get it corrected, which thankfully it finally did. But, nonetheless, people must read old blog posts on the hike and still try going up the driveway. Hawaii is terrible at trail maintenance, which is kinda crazy, so there are no signs pointing to the start. OK, there was one, but it hardly counts and is now missing. On my sunrise walks people continuously try to walk up the driveway only to get yelled at, which isn’t pleasant for anyone. Or, they’re often asking for the starting point, and there’s not really a good landmark to tell them where. I have had it in my head I’d help correct this for a while, but the pieces didn’t fall into place until recently.
When Jess and I visited the Bishop Museum, they were hosting a pop up exhibit of sorts by Parley, a company working to repurpose microplastics found on the beach. They made these plastic slabs and weren’t sure what to do with them. Well, I didn’t think of it until later, but I realized they’d make GREAT signs. So I had Jess go grab a few on her way home from work one day. I don’t think I have the before pictures…but you’ll get the point.
Jess and I then borrowed a cricut from another officer spouse and cut out lettering to stick on to the signs. We also drilled holes and bought plastic zip ties. These are our results:
It was our first go around and I am proud with how they came out. However, with version 2.0, I think we’ll work a bit more strategically on color picks. (see a trend with my sign for my husband? Graphic design has never been my strong suit). I thought the bright blue would pop better. Oh well.
This is what they look like hung up, and the remnants to the frame of what was the other sign:
I tried to remind myself that this signage was better than no signage and it’s a great first go around. Again, you can tell we probably should’ve done better color pairing… it was deceiving though!
Anyway, we went in the cover of darkness to hang them. I am sure we will not get in trouble and they are very easily removed. However, our neighborhood is just uppity enough that something like this could cause a stir. I don’t know, I’m probably being dramatic, but with all the weirdness that is Hawaii I wouldn’t be surprised if someone complained to be honest. You’d understand this better if you lived here. I’ll just say Hawaiians are very protective of their lands, as they should be!
Well, we’re a few days in and they’re still there. That’s encouraging!
I’m happy with this little community improvement project and hope it lasts.
I also invested in my own cricut after pleading with Brian for a bit. We’ll see what projects I get my hands dirty with next…
