North Shore

Are you tired of hearing about Hawaii yet? I am almost done posting pictures of our trip.

One of our days was spent up on the North Shore. This is the area of Oahu known for it big waves. But this was the wrong time of year for that. The ocean was actually rather flat and calm. But a few months ago the waves were 12+ feet tall and they were having surfing competitions. This was a good time to go snorkeling.

But in order to get up to the North Shore we had to drive through a bunch of farmland. There was fields and fields of pineapple and sugar cane. We decided we needed to stop at the Dole Pineapple plantation. They have a maze and a train ride as well as a tour but we decided we would just walk around the grounds a bit.  There was a lot of pineapple plants all around for us to see.

and some silly things for the kids.

Fish to feed.

This is a rainbow eucalyptus tree. I have never seen bark so many different colors.

And of course we had to get a very expensive pineapple soft serve ice cream cone.

There are lizards all over the place in Hawaii. I was often shocked by them just hanging out in the kitchen or on the fences or like this one on a light shade outside.

We jumped back into the cars and headed north to the beach. We stopped at a place called Shark Cove. No there were no sharks but there was a nice big rock enclosed pool where we would be able to see a lot of sea creatures.

My kids hadn't ever been snorkeling. There isn't much chance for it on beaches near us or perhaps we just haven't tried but they didn't know what they were doing. They didn't like the plastic tube in their mouth and had way more fun just exploring the tide pools and looking at the fish and trying to find shells that weren't inhabited.

Molly just loved getting to play in the shallows. She kept wanting to go deeper and we did take her out farther but mostly she just wanted to splash in the water.

My kids swam around for over two hours here just looking at fish and exploring the rocks.

Later we would regret not keeping our t-shirts on. Our sunblock must have worn off and we got a little crispy.

After Shark Cove we ventured over to Turtle beach to see if there were any turtles on the beach and we were in luck there were 7 big sea turtles laying on the beach.

They were roped off so people needed to stay back away from them. I was surprised that they had little signs posted with each turtles name and information about that turtle. I guess they have all the turtles tagged and keep track of them.

It was a fun day in the sun.

It looks like the sun sapped Henry's energy. He conked out on the drive back to Honolulu.

We certainly have seen a lot of the Island of O'ahu.