Wedding & Honeymoon Part 1

What a lucky girl I am....I could not have asked for a better wedding weekend!! Everything was perfect - except for the minor table fire!! :-)  We had fabulous weather all weekend - the cookout, the rehearsal and the wedding, everything!!  I had so much fun and it was so wonderful to have all of our family and friends together!!  I must admit....it went by in a blink - but luckily I have so many pictures so that I can relive all of the fun that we had!  (Too many to post here - probably won't get all of the pics up on Facebook until after we get back from Hawaii.)

I am currently sitting in the most beautiful place I have ever been with my husband and we are having such a fun time here in Hawaii!  We have already done so much and have more on the agenda!  We arrived here a little after 5:00 pm Hawaii time (11:00 pm Ohio time) on Monday after a LONG day of traveling.  We left Cleveland Monday morning at 7:20 (after almost missing our plane) and flew into Chicago.  We had a couple hour layover and then we boarded the plane going directly to Maui - an 8 1/2 hour flight.  We felt like sardines on the plane, but I had no trouble sleeping about 95% of the trip.  I had been up until 3:30 the night before packing and we left for the airport at 5:30, so I was pretty exhausted.  Greg wasn't so lucky.  He was pretty uncomfortable and his knees were jammed into the seat in front of us, so he was up most of the flight. 

We landed in Maui and we had to get our luggage from baggage claim, re-check in to a different airline and go back through security.  I had to rearrange some luggage because the tiny airline doesn't have the same luggage rules since the planes are so tiny, but it ended up working out okay.  It was about an hour flight from Maui to Kauai and I took pictures out the window most of the trip.

When we landed and all of our luggage was there (bonus!) we went across the street to get a rental car.  In hind-sight, we should have gotten one booked ahead of time, but I really didn't do anything to prepare for the honeymoon.  Most of the places were sold out of cars, but one place ended up having a Dodge Challenger (a muscle car) for $120 a day.  Since a cab ride to our hotel would have been about $50, we decided to take it and then we went on to Expedia when we got back to our hotel and booked a car for the rest of the week for about $40 a day.

When we got to our hotel (thank GOD for my mom telling us to take a GPS), we checked in and they handed us a Mai Tai with our room key!  I was happy as a clam.  We drove over to our condo and dropped off our luggage and then we went back to a nice little restaurant in our complex and had dinner and a drink.  I had my OSU cheerleader shirt on and our waitress turned out to be a former Arizona State cheerleader.  She started to ask if I knew a cheerleader...and I finished her sentence by shouting "Paul Tapazi"!  It's such a small world!  He cheered for OSU for a couple years before transferring to ASU.

Greg was hurting pretty bad by the end of dinner (and I was getting a little tired myself) so it was an early evening for the both of us.  We woke up pretty early Tuesday morning (I actually forced myself to sleep until about 7:30) and we spent the day wandering around the South Shore (where we are staying).  Did I mention that there are chickens and roosters ALL OVER the island?!?  They like to crow all morning long!

Anyway, Tuesday we went to our beach for a little bit, but just to look around.  Neither of us like to lay out all that much.  Maybe once we get to Maui we will relax on the beach a little more, but we are in full adventure mode right now. This is our beach at our condo. 

Then we went to see the Spouting Horn (a famous landmark on the island) which is basically a water blowhole, but there is a second hole that only blows air, which makes it sound like a horn.

On the way back to the condo, I happened to look out the window and saw something in the water.  I told Greg to pull the car over and I hopped out before the car even stopped.  This is what I saw:

He came right up on the shore.  There were people swimming around and it was so cool!! Apparently this isn't a very common occurrence because he was on the news later that night.  They are called "Monk seals". After, we went to the grocery store and got some food for the week and then we had to switch out cars, which took a couple hours.  We had reserved a mid-size car online and we ended up getting a Jeep Liberty - which was perfect.  We found a WalMart near the airport (the only one on the island) so we shopped a little bit and then came back to the condo.  We researched the island, booked a couple excursions, came up with a game-plan for the week and had a relaxing evening.  Tuesday was another early night (still trying to adjust to Hawaii time).

Wednesday morning, we woke up and headed to the airport.  We had our helicopter ride and it was pretty incredible.  We chose to book the 4-passenger helicopter with no doors.  I, unfortunately, didn't have the best seat (in fact...I had the WORST seat) so Greg took the pictures - which I was a little bummed about, but the pictures turned out great.  The sights were absolutely breath-taking!  We saw parts of the island that you could never see unless you were in the air!  I don't even know how to pick a couple of the pictures to post!!  I LOVED all of the waterfalls - they were my favorite!  We saw so many all over the island!

After we landed, we grabbed lunch at Subway and drove all the way up the coast to the North Shore.  We stopped at every beach along the way and we went to another famous Kauai landmark - the lighthouse.

We have already taken a couple thousand pictures and we've only been here for 3 days!  I have already decided that I am going to have a separate album for most of the scenery pics so people won't have to go though all of them if they don't care about the landscape-type pictures.  Anyway, we drove all the way up the coast, stopping at every look-out point, until the highway dead-ends in to a beach.

The northwest part of the island (called Na Poli) is all cliffs and mountains and you cannot get there by car or foot.  We saw a lot of it from the helicopter, but naturally I wanted to get some more pictures of it, so we went out on a 5 1/2 hour catamaran trip today to see it from the ocean.

The center of this island is all mountains and in the center is what they call "The Crater" - this part of the island gets over 35 FEET of rain each year.  It is so weird because there is basically a rain cloud over the center of the island at all times.  The surrounding island can have crystal blue skies.  It's like a weird Disney movie where the monster lives.  The West shore only gets about 22 inches of rain a year.  It is so bizarre.  The middle of Kauai is the wettest spot on the whole planet.

After our venture around the island yesterday, we came back to the condo and changed for dinner.  We went to this really great restaurant across the street called "Keoki's Paradise".  It was such a pretty and fun atmosphere, but we didn't save room for their famous "Hula Pie" - we hope to try it before we leave on Tuesday.  The restaurant had a tiki bar with a big pond and waterfalls all over.  There were tiki torches all around the water with big exotic trees - it was awesome!

Today (Thursday) was spent on the catamaran.  We left at 6:30 this morning and we didn't get back to the dock until 1:00.  It was such a nice trip.  I wore SPF 85 because the whole right side of my body is burnt from being in the car all afternoon yesterday!  This Hawaii sun is pretty powerful!  We went all around the West Shore up to the Na Pali coast and it was beautiful!  We stopped to snorkle, had lunch and cocktails!  We saw dolphins and turtles and lots of fish.  The dolphins swam right along the boat.  It was really cool!

Since we got back from our trip, we have just been relaxing and enjoying this beautiful weather.  I love it here - I am sitting in shorts and a tank top, we have all of the windows and doors open, the ceiling fans going and it is the perfect temp.  We will probably go out to eat tonight and relax.  Tomorrow, we are going on an ATV waterfall tour!