Hawaiian Vacation!

Hawaii was a much-needed, much appreciated vacation from life! It was just amazing.

We kayaked on the ocean, swam with dolphins, went to the Polynesian Cultural Center and Pearl Harbor, ate delicious food, lounged on the beach, hiked to a beautiful waterfall which we swam in, and went scuba diving! It was too much fun!

My favorite part, by far, was scuba diving. They taught us how to do it in a pool first, which I'm really thankful for because it helped a lot! Then, we went into the ocean. It was a little scary, I'm not going to lie, but only the breathing part was scary. I was worried that I'd find the ocean scary, because c'mon, it's the ocean, but that part was fine. It was the breathing. It just didn't feel right that I was breathing under water. It took some getting used to. I kind of panicked on our first dive because my regulator (the mouthpiece you breath in and out of) fell out and even though they taught us how to get all the water out, it kind of freaked me out because when we practiced, I knew it was going to fall out; in the ocean, it just fell out from a strong current. It was scary. Once I put it back in my mouth, I pushed the button that takes all the water out of it and took a breath, but it still had some salt water in it, so I swallowed a mouthful of seawater. That was unexpected as well, so it took me awhile to get my breathing under control. I just had to tell myself to relax, and it was fine. After that, it was smooth! We saw so many sea turtles, we touched an octopus that inked us several times, and we saw a couple of eels, and of course we saw beautiful fish. It was breath-taking. One of the sea turtles was literally inches from Derek's face and just stared him down for about 30 seconds. It was amazing. We had an underwater camera, but unfortunately, we ran out of film before we saw all of the cool things. We took most of the pictures on the first dive, because we didn't know we were going on a second, and literally right before we saw the first sea turtle, our film ran out. Derek also said that he was so used to digital cameras, that he forgot he couldn't take as many as he wanted. Oh well! It's just an excuse to go again!

I wish I had pictures from the rest of the trip, but Judi and Jen took all of them on their fancy cameras and we haven't gotten them from them yet. We'll see if I post them once I get them. :)