Hello Everyone who Blogs,
I am learning to Blog. You are my guinea pigs. Sorry about that :)

Neal and I went to Hawaii for the first time. We left January 7th and returned January 22nd. Leda, Russ and Mother were with us in Oahu until January 12th when they flew home and we flew to Maui.

This is Mother resting on a bench on the hike up to Diamond Head. She is trying to decide if she can make the climb.

Neal decided to help Mother along somewhat...and together they made a great climb! She went clear to the top. I know how this feels, because I have been on a lot of hikes with Neal and when I start slowing him down too much, he starts lifting and pulling me along. It can be irritating to me, but Mother seemed to love it. She kept saying, "He's taking all the work out of this for me!"

Here we are at the top of Diamond Head. You can see Waikiki in the background.

Neal and Mother with a beautiful lighthouse in the background. Loved the blue, blue ocean.

After our Farm Bureau convention, we headed to the other side of the island. We visited the Dole pineapple plantation on the way (great pineapple ice cream) on the way to Laie. The temple there is so beautiful! The setting is vast and gorgeous surrounding the Temple grounds. We were SO disappointed that it was closed for cleaning. How dare it be???? We enjoyed the visitor's center there.

This is the view out of the "picture" window in the visitor's center-so beautiful. Also a picture of us with Mark Eubank (the weather guy). He has been serving as the head guy at the visitor's center for 3 years. He was going to go home that Saturday. He was very gracious about having a picture with us.
Here are the beautiful doors...that we couldn't get in! You can see the pools reflected in them. More pictures of the grounds.

Here is the view from the front doors looking out to the ocean in the distance. It doesn't matter how far from home we are, when we find a temple or a chapel, we feel at home.



















The Polynesian Cultural Center was so fun! Leda was along when we were there, so I didn't get many pictures (she is a great photographer), but I'll post what I have. This first picture is priceless!! Mother with two tongan warriors, is this cute, or what??? Mother was a lot of fun during the whole time on Oahu. She is a good traveler and easy to please. Also fanatic about paying her own way. She was thrilled that Neal could get the Fox News channel on his new smart phone when the place we were staying didn't have it! She truly loves to see new things.














Leda became everyone's favorite photographer. She was always offering to take pictures for other people. Here she is getting some cute Japanese ladies with the stars of the program "Haa--The Breath of Life"









What a wonderful performance this was. We also enjoyed riding in a canoe through the different parts of the center, learning new things about the Pacific Island countries and just being together in such a beautiful setting. We went to a yummy luau here and received flower leis. At one of the gift shops Leda, Mother and I tried on those wrap around thingies that the hawaiian beauties wear. If I can figure out how to download those pictures from Neal's camera, I'll post them sometime. As it is, I'm doing good to get this far.



Neal and I on the beautiful beach at Turtle Bay on the North Shore. There was a nice little beach just out from our Tiki Moon Villa lodging, but we couldn't totally relax there, since there was a mother seal lounging around and she didn't want to be disturbed in the least...just ask Russ about that! We stayed directly across the street from the Polynesian Cultural Center. Notice that Neal is in play clothes! Those are light weight nylon pants. A friend that goes to Hawaii a lot told him to leave his Wranglers home, too hot.



We decided to try out some of the island sweet corn. We thought it was interesting how it was packaged. A different texture, almost crunchy, and not as sweet and tender as ours...but who's is??









In our travels, we always enjoy finding weird stuff (why is this underlining?) What in the world does Hygienic Store mean? It didn't look all that clean by any means. Once when we were in Arizona visiting Canyon de Chinle National Park, we passed an Indian reservation and there was a sign that said, "Port-a-potties make great out houses". I have always been sorry I didn't stop for that one. They were serious and sure enough, most of the homes had a satellite dish, but no indoor plumbing, out houses everywhere and a few had taken the advised port-a-potty route.


OK. I'm stopping here before I go on to Maui. If anyone is reading this, let me know if it is coming out right. I'm a little nervous about the whole procedure, but willing to learn. I'd like to end this part by saying that it was so fun to be with Leda, Russ and Mother. We hope we will have many more trips in the future together. And besides, if Leda would blog all this, I wouldn't have to! Love, Caroline