Hawaiian Adventure: Day 3

Day 3 dawned bright and early again. We went to the corner and got ourselves some McDonald's breakfast to-go, then crossed the street and ate on the beach as the sun rose. Then we enjoyed an early morning swim. Waikiki is a great place to swim if you don't like waves--very calm and gentle. Afterwards we went back to our room to clean up and check out of hotel #1, then we took a shuttle back to the airport to pick up our rental car. It was a cute little white Chevy, and it was fun to drive.

Once we had the car, we went to Sarah's apartment. It was her day off, so we made her spend it all with us. First we headed over to Paradise Park, which is a rain forest preserve near Honolulu. We ate lunch at a place called the Treetop Restaurant. It's an Asian buffet on the third floor of a building in the middle of the rain forest, so when you sit at your table and look out the window you can see the top of the trees making a big canopy over the whole forest. It was super thick and very cool. This is the view from the restaurant:

If you ask me, the food was a bit too authentically Asian, so Sarah and I didn't enjoy it as much. But Tyler loved it! He kept finding things that he hadn't eaten since his mission in Taiwan. So it's good that somebody enjoyed it, I suppose. It didn't matter, though. We weren't there for the food. We were really there because of...the "Lost" bear cages!!! (I told you we are obsessed. Don't worry, Sarah mocked us the entire time. We know that we're nerds.) The bear cage scenes were filmed on the side of the restaurant, in a part of the forest that is blocked off to almost everyone. But if you look over the balcony, they are right below you!

It was so cool. Tyler and I almost passed out when we saw them. Once we finished lunch we hurried outside and tried to find a way to sneak down to them, but alas, everything was locked or blocked off, and we couldn't find a way. The closest we could get was an outside staircase on the second floor.

Oh well. Once our dreams were sufficiently dashed, we explored the park a little more and walked up the trail towards Manoa falls. It was so beautiful and green everywhere. It's amazing (and slightly scary) how the green ivy grows on everything. It looks like the forest floor is slowly swallowing everything in sight.

The "meadow" type clearing in the pictures above has been used to film scenes for "Lost" and "Hawaii Five-O," among other things. And another important "Lost" sight we found was Charlie's banyan tree!

Our little hike didn't last too long, because we had lots of important things left on the list to do. Next stop, the Dole Plantation. We drove through huge, endless fields of pineapple, and it looked really cool. The soil is bright red, because it's volcanic, and for some chemistry-related reason, that makes it very rich and fertile, which is why it's great for growing things. We stopped at the main building and bought some "Dole Whip" ice cream, which is soft-serve ice cream mixed with fresh, pureed pineapple. It was the most DELICIOUS thing ever!

As we munched on our Dole ice creams, we continued driving up to the North Shore. We stopped at Haleiwa Beach Park to see if the turtles were out. (There are some big sea turtles that live on the beach there.) Unfortunately they weren't up on the sand, but there were several out in the water that we could see. I couldn't get a good picture because of the sun on the water, but it was fun to watch them. Sarah wanted us to go swim with them, but I am WAAAAAY to chicken for that! We watched for a bit and then drove a little further down the road to Waimea Bay.

On our tour the day before, we thought Waimea Bay was one of the prettiest beaches we'd seen, and Sarah said the waves were great there, so we decided to go back. I am so glad we did! It was one of the coolest things we did on our whole vacation. I felt like a real beach bum. We stayed the whole afternoon. Sarah taught us how to swim with such big waves and not drown, and it's a good thing she did! Even with all her wisdom, we still wiped out and ate sand and choked down way too much salt water. This is a picture from Sarah's phone of one of the waves. Look how little the people's heads are--that wave is easily 5 or 6 feet! We even had a few--though not too many--that were bigger than that.

Sarah had planned to take us to some other beaches that day, but we were having so much fun that we ended up staying the whole rest of the afternoon. By the end, we were so exhausted! On our way back to the car, we had the perfect view of the bay and a gorgeous Hawaiian sunset.

It was the perfect end to a perfect afternoon. Once we got back to the car, we headed straight for a Hawaiian Shave Ice stand. All that swimming made us starving, and it was a long drive back to the city before we'd get any dinner. It was yummy--like a gourmet snow cone with ice cream. When we made it back to Honolulu, Sarah took us to a place called "Teddy's Bigger Burgers," which is basically the Hawaiian version of Inn-N-Out. But SO MUCH better! They have super yummy fries and milkshakes, and dozens of different burgers that are, indeed, the biggest hamburgers ever. It was divine. By that time, though, we were just about falling asleep in our food. So once we finished dinner, we dropped Sarah off at home, then headed to hotel #2 for the night.