First Day in Hawaii

We woke up Friday morning and ate some Burger King for breakfast, then headed up from Waikiki to a road called Tantalus Drive.  This is a place I would love to live.  It was beautiful!  This tree was right next to the road and looked like an Ent out of "Lord of the Rings," beard and all.

While driving on this road, we stopped at a turn out and hiked up a trail called the Pu'u 'Ohi'A Trail.  It was a bit of an adventure because I knew about where we were on a map that had a trail that looked like it intersected with another trail to a waterfall.  This is always iffy, but this time it turned out great!  We hiked through a bamboo grove that was awesome.  Jeremy could climb it and it looked just like the flying on "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."  I tried, but I couldn't grip the bamboo like he could, but it looked like a blast.  Bamboo is flexible, but extremely strong and very beautiful.  It was also great because we had the entire trail to ourselves.

Here are some panorama shots I love that my camera takes that show the height of the bamboo.

After hiking for quite a while, we realized we were not going to connect to the waterfall trail.  The trail got more and more narrow and these ferns were very scratchy when there was nowhere else to walk.  So we went just a little further and came to this view.  The pictures don't quite do it justice.

In this picture, if you zoom in on the center right, you can see the waterfall we were aiming for.  This was the end of this hike (the trail got even worse) so we turned around and hiked back to the car.

One of my favorite plants: Birds of Paradise Flowers

One of my favorite trees: "Go Dogs, Go!" Trees

 After we got done with our hike, we drove around to the other side to actually hike to the waterfall.  Its called the Manoa Falls Trail and they filmed part of "Lost" here.  It was so beautiful and so green even though it rained a good chunk of the time.

Here's a side view of a bunch of "Go Dogs, Go!" Trees.

Here were some cool vines growing up a huge tree. Pretty much every plant, tree, and flower was my favorite at one point in the trip.

After finishing this hike, we were getting pretty hungry, so we headed to Costco.  We got some lunch and stocked up on food and Gatorade for the week.  We also rented our snorkel gear for the week so we just kept everything in the car.

That evening, we walked across the street from our hotel to Waikiki Beach.  Then we walked down the beach and watched a free fireworks show that was really good.  It was an amazing day in Hawaii.