Our honeymoon wasn't a huge story to write home about, but two months later we went on our REAL honeymoon. Thats the story I want to elaborate most on.
After two months of being married Paul and I were blessed with the opportunity to go to Oahu and Kauai. The first stop, Oahu was to go to a wedding in the Laie Temple. Paul's "adopted" sister from Norway was getting married there.
Because we decided to detour to Oahu, we were able to visit Pearl Harbor, and swim with sea turtles.
Pearl Harbor was an amazing experience. Its hard to believe that history really took place right where I stood.
After Sofie and David got sealed in the temple, they wanted to do a beach wedding. While we were waiting for Sofie to get all pretty and stuffs, we took a trip to a local beach.
This beach is known for having lots of sea turtles beach on the shores. There is a rule that you are not supposed to touch the sea turtles, but when you are swimming in the ocean and they swim pretty much right into your leg, you don't really have a choice not to touch them. I did get to cross "swim with sea turtles" off of my bucket list. Sometimes beauty comes in one of the simplest forms.
Also while we were waiting we took a trip to the Dole plantation. I never knew there were so many kinds of pineapples out there! There were teeny tiny pineapples, red colored pineapples, long skinny pineapples, all kinds! It really was so neat to see how we get the pineapples that we have.
That evening we had a lovely wedding ceremony on the beach for Sofie and David Redford. Somehow we managed to find a pretty secluded beach. The ceremony was short, sweet and to the point. But the ocean setting in the sunset was beautiful.
While we were on Oahu, Paul and I were also able to visit a swap meet, and visit the old Iolani Palace, One of the only Palaces in the United Sates. There is so much culture and heritage here it just amazes me.
The plants and native animals are also very intriguing to me. I wish I could have seen more of them. This is us hanging from one of the crazy trees that populate Hawaii
After the awesome adventures on Oahu, Paul and I took a plane to the island of Kauai.
Oahu was beautiful don't get me wrong, but Kauai was just breath taking. You know all those pictures that you see that are beautiful and look photo shopped, yeah well they really aren't photo shopped. Kauai really is THAT beautiful!
I mean look at that picture below! That is a picture of the Na Poli coast. Paul and I hiked along the Na Poli coast one of our days on Kauai.
We only did an eight mile day hike, but it was still something spectacular. We hiked through a huge bamboo forest and ended up at a really large and gorgeous waterfall.
The hike back was a little scary because it was getting dark and we were worried about being stuck in the middle of the jungle during a flash flood or something like that.
While on Kauai, Paul and I were also able get a free surfing lesson. We ran into a guy on the beach that had a surfboard and he just let us take it. We weren't professional when we first got on, but, I think there was at least one wave that both of us rode in. So that was pretty neat.
We went on a horseback riding trip to a waterfall. The horses were pretty much trained to walk the same path over and over again, but somehow, Paul and I got our horses to deviate their normal course for just a little bit.
We visited the Kilauea light house with Paul's Parents. They came to Hawaii for the wedding, and somehow ended up on the same island as us after the wedding. Anyhow, as a family we all went out to the light house and sort of visited the bird sanctuary.
There were several other wonderful stops we got to make while we were there. One of them was to a beach called Tunnels beach. It is known for the coral reef that looks like a lot of tunnels. That was my first experience with snorkeling. We snorkeled two other places on Kauai. All of them were different but they were all so beautiful.
Another stop we went to was the blow hole. It is called spouting horn. It is a hole in the rocks that turns into a "geyser" type thing. when the water pushes into a cave it shoots it out the top.
We hiked to a waterfall Wailua falls. It was supposed to be just a drive to the waterfall, but when a local hobo told has how to hike down to it, we decided to do it. The trail was super steep and kind of scary, but luckily there were ropes to hold on to.
One of my favorite stops was at a local swimming hole. Not very many tourists know about it. You kind of have to be in the "IN" crowd to know about it. Some how my parents found out about it and told us how to get there. There was a rope swing, and a water fall you jump off of and a pond you swim in. It was so much fun to swim in, but it was scary also. It had been raining the whole week before we got there so all of the rivers were flooded and rushing really fast. No one go swept up in a rushing current so it was all good.
We tried to do a hike through some tunnels but the roads were too flooded we couldn't get to the hike spot. We did find some huge jungle leaves and as big as me!
The last place we stopped before the airplane was Waimea Canyon. It is basically considered the Grand Canyon of Hawaii. The roads were kind of closed off so we couldn't drive around everywhere, but we did get a few beautiful views of it before we had to leave the beautiful oasis of Kauai.
There is so much that we did on our second honeymoon, I probably didn't write it all, but we loved the fact that our first experience traveling together turned out to be so memorable.
