Day 6

 On Saturday we wanted to go back to Laniloa Beach. We walked over there and had a really fun day.

Rockwell dug a deep moat to protect our stuff from getting wet. He was very proud of it. :)

The water felt amazing. We all swam out pretty far and just hung out in the water. The sun was shining and the waves were just pleasant and perfect. It was so fun.

It was a beautiful day!

We went to the pool again that afternoon. Damon took his life jacket off for the last few days at the pool and improved his swimming a ton! He was jumping in and swimming all around. He was so proud of himself!

Day 5

 We were planning on hiking Maunawili Falls with Melanie, but when she told us that it's way more muddy than Likelike Falls was, we decided it would be best if Mel and I did this one on our own. We met up early Friday morning. She asked if I was up for a little more strenuous of a hike to a couple additional waterfalls and a rock waterslide since the kids weren't with us. That was an easy yes for me!!

This hike was gorgeous too!

She was definitely not wrong about the mud!!

Maunawili Falls were beautiful! Everywhere you looked was just gorgeous!

Mel brought her waterproof bag so we could put our clothes, phones, and keys in there while we swam where we needed to go. We swam through this pool and climbed up the left side of the waterfall. Then we hiked a bit more until we came to this waterfall.

We swam through this one too and kept climbing to the next one. The third wasn't flowing much at all so we didn't even stop to get our cameras out for that one. The next thing we came to was this cascading fountain and the waterslides.

We stayed here for a while and slid down the rocks a few times.

When we got back to Maunawili Falls, I jumped in at the waterfall.

This hike was such a blast!! I have wanted to do something like this since I was young. I just love love loved it! Mel knew of a shortcut on the way back and so we parked one of our cars right by that outlet. We avoided the mud on the shortcut, and so we were pretty clean when we got to Mel's car.

Paul had taken the kids to the pool while I was hiking and they were still there since it wasn't very crowded. I hung out there with the kids while Paul went over to Hukilau Market for lunch. That afternoon we drove up to the North Shore and played at Ke Iki Beach. The waves here were absolutely enormous! Professional surfing competitions are held on the North Shore, and we could immediately see why. The rip curl waves were just giant. It was fun to watch some people surf them, but we didn't let the kids go very far into the water because it wouldn't have been safe to play in. It was more of a play in the sand kind of beach. Tessa built herself a nice chair. :)

We were excited that there were shells though and collected some cool ones. We also saw two whale spouts out in the water, which was really cool.

We stopped at a fruit stand on the way home and got some delicious fruits and vegetables.

Day 4

 We were all feeling pretty sunburned by Wednesday night, so we decided Thursday should be a day out of the water. We went to Pearl Harbor that morning. 

The online tickets for the boat out to the USS Arizona were all booked by Wednesday night, so we had to wait in a standby line for quite a while. I'm so glad we did though, because it was very neat to see the remains of the Arizona in the ocean. We took turns looking through the museums while we waited in line.

We took a boat out to the memorial they have built over the remains of the USS Arizona.

That morning Paul talked to the kids about Pearl Harbor and showed them part of the movie to help them understand the significance of what happened there and why it is a reverent place. That helped make this more meaningful for them and helped them to understand what they were seeing.

There is a room at the far end of the memorial that has all the names of the men who died that day. It was very powerful and moving to spend time in that room looking at the wall. 

We stopped at a Malasada truck on the way to the Diamond Head hike.

Diamond Head was a much cleaner hike, but it was also a much hotter hike. We were all sweating on this one for sure.

We hiked through a tunnel which was pretty cool.

The views were amazing!!

You could see the whole city of Honolulu.

On the way down there was a beautiful view of a lighthouse.

We stopped in a Target on our way home and got the kids swim shirts to prevent more sunburns. They were excited for them and Tess wore hers to the pool that night even though the sun was down.