Clown Car

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I spent today cramming myself and four others into a Dodge Neon. Three adults (one pregnant) and two children of car seat age. I got the back with my feet on the hump between said car seats. Comfy. We only did the in/out part about 6 times. By the end, we were pretty good at it.

I think I became less scary to the kids throughout the day; I got a sloppy kiss from Gracie and a g'night high-five from Ezra. We played rocket ship, sang songs, did some hair (very curly baby hair), played with one of the coolest marble toys I've ever seen, and drooled over some shoes (Grace: literally, me: figuratively).

I'm on my second day with no work. I've decided to head back to reality a day early. It seems the right thing to do.

Shrimp Truck

Okay. I think this is the last Hawaii post. No promises, but I think this is it.

We discovered shrimp trucks. These are little mobile (or formerly mobile) vans, RVs, trucks that have been converted to shrimp-cookin' businesses. Some are hit-and-miss with their cooking, but others are amazing. I think my final count for the week was three different trucks. I took a picture of the last one. Behind it is a shrimp farm. You could (as the sign advertises) get live shrimp to take home or just let them cook it there. It's messy (you usually have to peel your own), but definitely worth it.

Rooms with views

I promise that this will be one of the last, if not the last post about the recent trip. We switched hotels halfway through the week. The first hotel was a Marriott property and financed through the benefits of all the travel I did last year. The second was the conference hotel, which was also very nice, but there was a lot of construction in the area and I was a little disappointed in the view (they said they upgraded us to "partial ocean view"--I say they couldn't find people that wanted the rooms.) It turns out that everything went really smoothly and other than the disappointing view, the hotel was fabulous.

Let's compare the views from the rooms:


...and the nearby lagoons.


Needless to say, it was a little difficult to adjust to the second view. Actually, for random information, the lagoon on the left (from the first week) is associated with Paradise Cove, the location that the conference took us for our luau. It was really cool and it seemed that the performers were so happy to be there. It was so much more than I expected.

Surfing

Last blog said that I had gone surfing and had a great time. The guy that took pictures during the class and surf time, Joel Sadoy of Island Classic Shots, gave me permission to post some of the shots on my blog. He did some really great work and was really patient with all of us when deciding to get the pictures or not (Thanks, Joey!).

This is the second day, before the class, looking out over the huge (ha!) waves we're going to try to surf.

Waiting at the surf truck. We had to travel from the surf shop to the beach and fortunately didn't have to lug our own boards. I think mine was 10' on the first day and 9' on the second. No way would that fit in the Aveo that we rented.

This is my first wave ever! Note the dry hair and the stupid smile I have on my face.

This is sometime later in the first day. Still smiling.

Jeremy took the lesson with my re-do on Saturday. I think he had a good time, too. This was a picture of him heading out to give it a shot.

Trip Report--Midweek

Having taken a day to recover from the trip and let Jeremy get good and burnt in an odd way, we took Thursday and did our obligatory touristy duties. Jeremy went skydiving and I took a beginning surfing lesson.

A few snaps from the adventure so far:

Jeremy in his tandem jump get-up, ready to go.

I didn't get any worthwhile shots of him after. He looked much the same. The sun seemed to be in the wrong place to get a picture of him coming down, and when I figured out which one he was, he was on the ground. We went to Pacific Skydiving. They were really great people. Jeremy was hauled out of the plane at 14,000 feet and had a good, long free fall. They also didn't pressure me into trying it. For this, I was thankful.

At lunch we tried to figure out how far the Kresser initials reached.

This is me getting ready for my surf lesson from Surf n Sea. I thought the rash guard was a bad idea and would cramp my style, but now I am certain that it was a very, very good idea because it kept me from skinning my tummy and upper arms. Plus, it looked cute.

Out of the water...it seems that I was the last one out. There may have been some betting on how long the instructor would be willing to stay out with me. They had a photographer out in the water with us. I'm going to try to get permission to post them. We'll see.

These last couple are just views from our hotel room. It's a rough life.