Trip of the Decade: Part I

Have you ever spent ten days with your spouse?  I mean ten full uninterrupted days just the two of you.  My guess is that most of us have not.  When you're dating you spend lots of time together, but someone goes home at night.  Then you get married and you have work and school and, compared to when you were dating, it feels like you never see each other.  Pretty soon you have kids and life sets in and you are lucky to get a date night in, and really lucky to squeeze in a weekend getaway.  When Jeff and I got married in the middle of the semester, we didn't have time or money for a honeymoon.  So we said that in ten loooong years we would make sure to take a big anniversary trip.  Well ten short years later we found that we didn't have any more time or money than we did when we got married...maybe even less.  We were pretty sure our big ten year trip wasn't going to happen, and then Tina, our family friend, offered her time share in Hawaii.  We thought about it for three seconds before we booked our flight.

 We've only flown together once before, nine years ago with my whole family.  It's a good thing we love each other, because sitting that close to someone you didn't like for that long of a flight would get a little uncomfortable.

 When we finally landed in Hawaii we loved the Christmas trees all decorated with seashells.  Mele Kalikimaka!

 Neither of us had ever been anywhere tropical before and we couldn't  get over how everything was completely open-air.  Walking through the airport you couldn't tell when you were indoors or outdoors.  It was all the same, and it was all beautiful.

 Our second day there was Sunday, so we headed to the next town for church.  Hypocrite travelers that we are, we hit Bubba's Burgers before the meetings began.  The Christmas tree behind us was decorated with fries and onion rings.  And Bubba's was just as good as everyone said it would be.

 After lunch we walked down the sidewalk to look at some of the local shops.  We crossed a bridge and Jeff thought he spotted something in the water. I reassured him that it was just a rock.  After much debate and a lot of teasing we moved on, purchased a few souvenirs and then walked back across the bridge to church.  Only when we got to the bridge, the 'rock' had moved.  It was an endangered Hawaiian monk seal!  I was so shocked I dropped the bag I was carrying into the water below.  Thankfully plastic bags are illegal in Kauai and the paper sack our purchases were in floated.  With the help of a palm frond I worked my way under the bridge and successfully retrieved our bag...and hopefully didn't disturb the seal too much.

 Jeff will never let me live down the 'rock' seal incident.

 We couldn't get over all the wild chickens on Kauai.  They are everywhere!

 We drove up to Opaekaa Falls after church.

 We ran into some people we know from Utah there, who took this picture for us.

 Then we drove on up to Wailua Falls, which was absolutely gorgeous.  We were wishing we weren't in our church clothes so we could hike down a little closer, but seeing it from the lookout was still great.

 That night we headed to the highly recommended Duke's Canoe Club for dinner.

 The restaurant is right on the beach.  We couldn't help but walk down and dip our toes in the water.

And we even decided to tackle the Hula Pie.  Don't worry...it was no problem for the two of us.  Chocolate, macademia nuts, fudge, ice cream, lets just say it was divine.

We were kind of surprised how much fun it was to have only the two of us to worry about.  We ate where we wanted when we wanted and did whatever we wanted.  It didn't take us long to figure out what everyone had been telling us.  Kauai is paradise.