Kona Hawaii

We went on a vacation with the Dodges to The Big Island of Hawaii on the Kona side. We've been wanting to return to Hawaii since Doug and I went to Maui 4 years ago. Ally suggested that we go during my 30th birthday and oh yes, take the kids. There is no better place to turn 30! We had so much fun on this trip. Everything was just perfect; the condo, the company, the weather, the food and the shopping.

Here are some of our first pictures on the island.

Carson and Doug checking out the view

Peyton and Jen on the condo balcony

The pool at our condo was fantastic.  It had a super shallow end that the kids could walk around in.  The outside edge of the pool had carpet which was great so it didn't burn our feet and the little ones couldn't slip.

Peyton and Jen

Doug and Carson

Mason, James, Brock and Ally

We went shopping a lot down Ali'i Drive.  There are a bunch of fun shops and restaurants to eat at.  I found lots of turtle (honu) things I couldn't live without.

This is how we got around town, Peyton was tied to my side and Carson went for a ride in the stroller.

Outside the restaurant, Bubba Gumps, we all took our turn posing on the bench with the Forrest Gump shoes, suitcase and box of chocolates.

                            

 Carson, Doug and Peyton

 

Ally and Brock 

They had a great system in this restaurant. If you needed a waitress/waiter you would flip the sign to STOP FORREST STOP and someone would be there almost instantly to see what you needed. Any other time you would just leave it on RUN FORREST RUN. I think more restaurants should do this. It made it fun and we had the quickest service we've ever seen.

                            

We decided to spend a few hours at the beach one day.  We took the chairs, beach towels and boogie boards that were in our condo.  The owners had a lot of stuff we were able to borrow like that.  

A day at the beach is not recommended with so many small children and sun block.  The sand stuck to their skin and then they were just uncomfortable.  However, Carson and Peyton did get to dip their toes in the Hawaiian ocean waters.

Carson had a great time in the water.

Peyton...not so much.......

    Her place was on mommy's lap.

Our condo also had a tennis court that Doug was super excited about.  Our condo owners also had tennis racquets so we got out there and played a bit.

Doug and Carson waiting for Jen's serve.

Returning Jen's serve 

James also found himself some good competition

                            

This guy was actually really good.  I'm guessing he's as old as all of us put together.  (Actually he was on the court next to us.  It was like a train wreck, you couldn't help but stare.  Someone that old, with that dark of a tan and that much edema in the legs, wow.)

For my birthday, the one thing I wanted to do was to eat at Roy's restaurant.  Roy's is a very fancy, expensive and delicious establishment.  We first found out about this place when we went to Maui and had dinner with Ang, my roommate from college and her family.  Since then we have gone to Roy's in Las Vegas and Doug got to go to the one in San Diego 9 months ago.

The Hamilton's

The Dodge's

        

My birthday dessert.  Mmmm, chocolate souffle.  It was sooo good!

As some of you may know, I love my sunset pictures.  The sunsets were not quite what they have been when we were there before.  They are socked in with vog.  Vog is like fog but since it is from the volcano they call it vog.  I guess it has been really bad for about the last 6 months.  So since that vog was so thick our sunset pictures suffered.  I still got some good ones but had to take them quick cause the sun would disappear behind the vog and that would be it.

 

To get good pictures of sunsets we had to take them with the sun up pretty high in the sky if we were going to get the ones with the orange color.  It quickly turned to purplish-gray as the sun dropped just that little bit.

Here in this sunset picture taken on another night you can see the sun starting to go behind the vog.

My birthday evening sunset.

Then there was one night as we sat outside eating at Bubba Gumps.  The sun was going down and we waited till it was time to run over and take that perfect sunset picture.  There was a tiki torch that just made it perfect.   I thought I had taken the most beautiful sunset picture.  But then James came back to the table 2 seconds after me and exclaimed that he had the best picture.  Well, please take a look below and you be the judge. 

My sunset picture......

James' sunset picture

As many of you heard, Chili had a huge earthquake creating what could possibly be a huge tsunami.  On our last full day there on the island we were woke up by the blaring of a siren at 6:00 am.  At first I thought that was their manner in which they call in the firemen similar to how Tangent does it.  This siren was extremely loud and continued to sound.  After laying there a while wondering when it was going to stop, it hit me--Tsunami.  I jumped up and stood on the bed to look out the window above our bed to see if there was a huge wave coming at us.  Thankfully, no, there wasn't.  We turned on our TV to see what was going on and soon after that I got a call from my mom and she quickly updated us.  The NEWS said to follow your evacuation plan that you have in place.  Hmm, we're tourists, we don't have one, humor us and go over what we should do.  They didn't, we had to make it up as we went along.  We did find out you need to have a full tank of gas, plenty of bottled water, toilet paper and SPAM.  We were covered on all those things except the spam.  

We decided to go up to a playground for the day after our condo manager came by and told us we needed to evacuate to higher ground by 8:00 am. 

Then about an hour after the tsunami was supposed to hit we went back and waited at the top of our street till they gave the "All Clear".  Everything was back to normal just like that.

Aside from the tsunami, everything was just fantastic.

The lizard in our condo.

Aloha!