Hawaii

Look I'm on the internet. We got up at 4am Tuesday morning (after sleeping only 3 hours) to make our flight, which was 8 hours long, and when we got to Hawaii, it was mid afternoon. So we went to bed as soon as the sun went down because we were so tired. Then we woke up at 5am wide awake. So Amanda and I went down and watched the sunrise from the beach. It was lovely and peaceful and nice to make the first foot prints on the shore. Then we went out to Pearl Harbor. I cried there. The museum is really wonderful and we took at boat out to the USS Arizona Memorial. As a future history teacher, it is definitely good for me to have been places like that. I wish I would take pictures. I carried my camera around all day and I never take a darn one. I want to have pictures, it just never crosses my mind to pull it out. Oh we were funny!: we toured this old submarine at the harbor and Amanda, Liz, and I made funny videos inside. The first one I filmed Amanda being the captain onf the phone and were getting fired upon so i made the camera shake terrentially and then liz took off running and dove through one of the metal high doors. I dont how to describe that. it is neat to be in there, but i have absolutely no idea what I am looking at. I think that is okay with me- I doubt there i will ever know much about mechanical anything. I'll let someone else take of those things and I'll keep working on my sewing abilities. Next video: Amanda and I were steering the boyancy wheels and clicking buttons and liz made a loudspeaker noise and said we had a ship on radar. Amanda and I frantically turned the system into the "quiet mode" and and made an engine dying noise in our throats then said "shh, they wont see us. don't make a sound." then liz made a farting noise. We yelled, "oh no! we've been discovered!", scolded liz, and I ran to ready the torpedo launcher. Okay it was funny. I'm the other tourists thought we were pretty wierd. But the little hawaiian employee inside thought we were hilarious. If you're lucky, we'll put it on facebookvideos. anyway, The rest of the day Amanda and I spent collecting shells, investigating coral skeletons, and chasing crabs. There are no seagulls here- just lots of scrawny pigeons and strange mo hawked orange birds that I have taken a liking to. We watched some Hawaiian skim boarders and I really wanted to ask one to let me try- but I didn't. He would run and throw it, and then since the waves are a bit bigger than they are in Galveston, he would ride up on a close breaker and his body would go horizontal before he came back down to his feet. Amanda and I bought some cheap snorkeling equipment yesterday and swam around our beach then almost got hit by two catamarans.
Then today- we went to this amazing bay to snorkel. It is in an old valcano crater of which one side collapsed and filled with water to create a narrow mouthed bay. there is an old hawaiian legend- the way the mountain surrounds it, it looks like a big sleeping lizard from nose and eyes on one point, to a high ridged back, then a narrowing pointed tale to the other point. Apparently a King of old turned himself into the mountain to watch over his daughter who had also turned herself into a mountain to escape a long triangle between her and two renowned warriors. We swam pretty far out into the bay. In some places, the coral was so shallow that you had to suck in your belly to keep from hitting it. In some of those places,there was sea urchin in every crevice and you just had to pray that you didn't scuff one beacuse that would hurt. In other places it was fifty feet deep and the water was the most beautiful blue! I saw so many different kinds of fish I couldn't name them all even if I did know what they were called. purple, orange, yellow, black, blue, with striped and/or pokadotted assortments off varioius shades of all those! I swam up next to three sea turtles!! They were pretty much beautiful.
On land, the vegetation is crazy! Big fat rafiki (sp? lion king) trees covered in twizzler-like ivy. Tomorrow is the free day. Amanda and I are renting a little tracker for "28dolla" and heading to a rainforest to hike. (jurassic park was filimed on this island.) We picked a mountainous area on the map with a high water fall. I'll tell you about it later. She brought a book of hawaiian plants so that we know what we are looking at. We'll drive the full circumferance of Oahu and stop by the north shore where the really big waves come through. The waves are biggest in the winter time but they will still be bigger than Waikiki were we are now. Well, tonight we are roasting a pig on a pike so I need to go get out of this now dry bathing suite and get the salt out of my hair. Smiling.