"Set your spirit free and sing along with me..."

I’m sorry this post is so late in coming. Life has been pretty busy (a post will soon be up regarding that) and I was having problems determining how to write this post so it didn’t turn out to be a mile long. But I think I have figured out a solution: I will write this post in a Question/Answer form. Lots of people have already asked me about my trip to Hawaii and have thus supplied with the questions I believe people are most interested in knowing the answers to. So here we go…

How was your trip?
Fantabulous! It was definitely the best vacation ever.

Where did you stay?
At the Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel on the Big Island. It’s a really, really nice place and we were lucky enough to get great rates on the rooms, thanks to my aunt. You can check out the hotel’s website here: Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel. I didn’t get any pictures of the resort, but my boyfriend did. When he gets back from his mission trip, I’ll post a link to his pictures.

Who went with you to Hawaii?
My dad, mom, brother, boyfriend, and my best-est Australian friend, Veronika, met us there. =D

What was your favorite part about Hawaii?
Swimming everyday. I loved being able to walk out our hotel room and go down to a white sand beach with no crowds and just swim around for the afternoon. The hotel had a great pool too for the days when there were jellyfish at the beach. On the last day we rented snorkel gear and explored around the rocks at the beach. There were tons of fish there! It was one of the coolest experiences of my life. We got to swim with turtles and everything! There were even more fish there than when we went snuba-ing in Kona.

What’s snuba?
It’s like scuba diving, but instead of having an air tank on your back, it floats on a raft above you and you’re connected to it by a 25 ft. hose. It’s really fun, albeit it was scary at first. You have to stay calm and trust the equipment to give you air. The easiest thing to do is just to keep moving and then you don’t think about it much. I would definitely snuba again if I could. It’s an interesting experience and it’s a great chance to see things that live a little bit deeper in the ocean.

What else did you do in Hawaii?
Lots of stuff! A couple of days we drove to the rainy side of the island to browse through shops, visit a botanical garden, and lookout over a black sand beach.

Did you swim at a black sand beach?
Nope. You needed some serious four-wheel drive to get down there, so we spared our rental van and decided our white sand beach was just as good to swim at.

How was the botanical garden?
Awesome! I’ve never seen so many tropical plants. They had a whole section of garden for orchids; it was beautiful.

So what else did you do…?
One day we went on a helicopter ride around the island. We flew over the lava fields on the desert side, over the active volcano and spewing lava, then around to the other side of the island and over rainforests and valleys that were filled with waterfalls. The valleys were so beautiful; it was scenery that could make you cry with wonder (yeah, I know it sounds cheesy, but it’s true).

Did the helicopter make you nauseous?
Nope. I took some of my anti-nauseous chemo meds beforehand and I was peachy keen through the whole ride. My mother was another story though…

Anything else of interest?
There was a day when Dad, Greg, and Ben went deep sea fishing; they didn’t catch much though and said if we ever went back they probably wouldn’t go out again, or at least not for as long. They caught a couple of fish called Ohno, by the way. We also went to the Volcano National Park and saw sulfur dioxide wafting out of the ground; there was a lava tunnel to walk through as well, which was neat. That same day we went to the park, we went to an orchid farm and purchased some plants. They’re very beautiful, though I do not have photos of them in bloom yet. My one plant, a Miltonia orchid (or pansy orchid), is not doing so well and I cannot figure out why. I think I’m going to have to cut the blooms off so it can focus on leaf growth since it’s losing so many leaves. I really hope it doesn’t die. Anyways, we also attended a luau. It was very entertaining and the food was great. (Pictures of the luau are also with my boyfriend since my camera didn’t have enough zoom power to get good shots of the dancers.)

I think that’s about it. Half the reason this post took so long to be put up was that I didn’t have a good place to load photos to. But now I found Google has a free photo album that easily uploads photos. So my Hawaii photo album can be found here: Hawaii 2007. I highly recommend you go through the album via the slideshow option, though if you just browse through the photos, you can see the general location of where each picture was taken.

Sorry again about the delay (which I just realized was about a month long). Enjoy the photos!

~Cheryl

"La Nova Alegria"- Cirque du Soleil's Delirium