Kauai by air and by sea

Landon convinced Rusty and I that we should all take a helicopter tour.  And we are so glad we did.  It was one of my favorite things I’ve ever done.  We drove out to the airport about 7:30 in the morning, did our quick safety briefing, and then we were on our way to the helicopter.  Landon sat in the back by one of the windows and Rusty and I sat in the front.  I was right next to the pilot.  I can’t even describe all the beautiful things we saw. 100’s of waterfalls, beautiful sweeping canyon views, vivid blue ocean, and long stretches of pristine beaches. 

    

The kids had a great morning with Grandma and Grandpa.  They slept in, watched cartoons, and went to the pool.  They also got to do a fun craft.  The boys made Christmas ornaments and Halle made some fun sea shell bracelets. 

That afternoon we headed over to the docks to take a boat ride of the Napali Coast.  We were scheduled for the sunset dinner cruise. During our initial briefing, the captain asked some trivia questions and whoever answered them correctly could win a shirt.  He asked, “What color are the Humuhumunukunukuapoa’a’s lips?  Josh’s hand shot in the air and he gave the correct answer, “blue.” He won a cute little t-shirt.  I also answered a question and won a shirt. I got mine in a kid size so Blake could have it.  Josh was so mad about that and kept saying, “But YOU earned the shirt.  It’s not fair that Blake gets it.”  Well, it turns out that Josh was concerned that I would take a picture of both him and Blake in their shirts together and he did NOT want to share in the glory. :) And then after all that, I didn’t even get a pic of Josh in his shirt.

As we were pulling out of the dock one of the engines wouldn’t start.  The captain yelled, “pull the ropes back out—tie us back up!”  Then the engine kicked in and he said, “Never mind.  Let’s go!”  So go we did.
Not too long into the ride, the engine failed again.  So, we were running on one engine.  We were going so so slow and didn’t even make it to the cool part of the coast before we had to turn around to go back.  We were all pretty disappointed.  They broke out the food, but now people were kind of in a bad mood and everyone at the front of the line piled their plates high in order to get their money’s worth out of the trip.  This resulted in the people in the back of the line, aka Rusty having practically no food left.  But that’s probably ok—the food was pretty sub par.  But then, miracle of all miracles, we ran into a pod of dolphins.  And it was AWESOME.  Our little Halle was in 7th Heaven.  There were even two little baby dolphins. They were swimming right alongside the boat and occasionally they’d jump up out of the water. Halle said to Grandma, “The boat breaking down turned into a good thing.  If it didn’t break, we might not have seen the dolphins.  It’s like karma.  That’s when something bad happens and them something good has to happen.” 

So even with the boat breaking down we had a wonderful adventure.  Seeing the dolphins was Halle’s very favorite part of the whole trip.