Hawaii Hikes and Food

Jared and I have figured out that we seem to follow a similar schedule when we are able to get away with just the two of us.

• Wake up early
• Eat breakfast "in" (whenever we are staying in a room with a kitchen/fridge)
• Go on a nice morning hike
• Go back to hotel/condo and get cleaned up
• Eat a nice, hearty lunch (usually a little later than normal) while we're out exploring, sightseeing, or doing activities
• Grab a light dinner or snack and flop into bed feeling good and exhausted

Hawaii was perfect most days for this kind of schedule. We really enjoyed our breakfasts of juice, yogurt and fruit...papaya and mango from a roadside stand.

We regretted that we didn't have more mornings available for hiking because we loved hiking through forests of trees with leaves and vegetation unlike any we'll ever find in Utah. We didn't see one other person on this hike - it was a treat and eerie at the same time to have the whole mountainside to ourselves.

I'm not even going to mention what Jared called these, but I laughed about it for days...

We loved, loved, loved the roadside shrimp. They had this spicy garlic shrimp that we died over so we had to go back a couple of times, until we ran out of cash and couldn't pay for it anymore because they didn't take credit cards.

I thought the outdoor sink was hilarious for no particular reason.

We think it's so fun to sample local cuisine. We found a good bakery for lunch one day and I thought it was fun to eat their Maui Style chips and seafood sandwiches. We stopped for snow cones that included beans and ice cream - certainly not a combination I would have ever dreamed up myself. And of course we paid a visit to the Dole Pineapple factory for some ice cream - I was really disappointed because the factory has become so much more "touristy" since I was there about fifteen years ago. It wasn't quite the same experience, which is sometimes the danger in returning to a place that holds fond memories. The Dole Whip was still yummy though.

One of our most memorable meals was at a restaurant right on the ocean. The food was delish and the setting was just what we'd hoped for.

Oh my gosh, I want to be there again! Our mantra for this vacation was "We can do whatever we want!" If we wanted to take a spontaneous detour, we just did it. If we wanted to put off lunch and deal with our grumbling tummies for an extra hour because we wanted to do something else or wait to eat at a specific place, we just did it. If we wanted to go to bed at 8pm because we were tired, we just did it.

And now we're back in the thick of real life where we really can't do whatever we want. We're okay with that because we chose to have a life with a family, but doing whatever we wanted, when we wanted for a whole week sure was nice while it lasted.