Our Trip to Hawaii

Matt had a convention in Hawaii for 10 days with a room at the Hilton so there was no way I was going to let him go without me! His boss's wife, Loretta, felt the same way so Loretta and I flew over to join them for the last week. We had so much fun staying at a nice resort, eating at great restaurants and shopping at the little tourist stores. Ashley came and joined us for a couple of days in Waikiki and then we went over to North Shore and stayed at Turtle Bay for a few more days. It's really close to Ashley's house and school so we got to hang out with her everyday. She went surfing, showed us the best places to eat and took us to the Polynesian Cultural Center for a 'haunted canoe ride'. (It was a few days before halloween.) It was really freaky because it was dark and there were guys in scary costumes hiding in the water and they would jump out and grab you or splash tons of water on you. One guy karate chopped Ashley in the stomach hard!
We had fun boogie boarding at Hukilau beach, swimming at Waimea and watching surfers at pipeline. On Sunday we went to church with Ashley and then afterwards had a big dinner for her and her friends. They were all so thankful and told us it was the best food they'd had in a long time. It was fun to feed some starving college kids and have them appreciate it so much.
Our last day we had breakfast at the Hukilau Cafe - the restaurant name they used in the movie "50 First Dates". We had macadamia nut pancakes that were so good. It was hard to leave Ashley but we are already excited to see her again for Christmas in about 4 weeks.

We went on a sail boat on Waikiki beach, it was so fun!



Ashley catching some waves.

This is our favorite boogie boarding beach.


Me and Loretta at the resort. They had flamingos and penguins, you can't tell from the picture, but it smelled really bad there!

This is Ashley outside of her house with her rusty old bike.

We went to the beach to watch Ashley surf.