Grand Canyon - birthday surprise

My 28^th birthday was the last day of our trip in Hawaii.  It was also my first birthday as a married woman.  :)  Good combo, if you ask me.  

                To make it even more spectacular, Blair had a BIG surprise.  As if Vegas and Hawaii trips, back-to-back, weren’t enough adventure…Blair planned a surprise bucket list trip to the Grand Canyon on our road trip back to Albuquerque!!  I was totally surprised!!  And SOOOOO excited!

               

 Because it was a surprise, and we had only planned to be in Vegas and Hawaii…both of which had really hot temperatures...we were very under-prepared for what we found on our way to the Grand Canyon.

Snow.  Lots of snow.

We had a lot of shorts, skirts, and tank tops.  A Walmart trip was essential and we each bought a sweater and long sleeve shirt.  Luckily we both had socks and tennis shoes already, as we had done a lot of walking around in the other two locations.  But we would have died without those last-minute cold weather clothes!

My first sighting of the Grand Canyon!

We wrote our names in the snow.  :)  It was very reminiscent of our honeymoon snow-writing.

 Driving to our lodge, we ALMOST hit 3 deer.  The sun was at the absolute perfect angle to make it almost impossible to see more than 5 feet in front of our car.  At the last second I saw a shadow of what looked like deer ears and shrieked for Blair to stop the car.  Just.in.time.

Then we found our lodge and got checked in. 

As I was looking around the lobby, Blair secretly informed the lady at the desk that it was my birthday.  They upgraded our room for free!  We were literally right on the edge of the cliff!  It was so awesome!

The only thing that was a tad scary about it was the fact that it was SO cold that the sidewalks and trails were icy.  I definitely didn’t want to slip and slide and fall down the canyon!  I walked soooo slowly around there.  Haha

Here's the view from our room.

This is the panoramic view from the edge of that sidewalk.  This was literally outside of our lodge door.

Our room, upgraded for free!  It wasn’t gorgeous, but it had a heater, and a fabulous view.  TOTALLY thankful.

I would have frozen to death if it weren’t for that heater.  My gosh it was cold.

Once we unloaded our bags into the room, the sun was starting to set and we were hungry for dinner.  We set out to find some dining in the lodge.  It was really tasty.

I don’t think I ever took off my coat during the meal.  I was chilled to the bone…but having a blast.

Blair “got up to use the restroom” part-way through our meal.  I found out later that he had secretly talked to our waitress and informed her that it was my birthday.  Sneaky pants.  She brought me a free chocolate dessert!

She, alone, started to sing to me…and about 1 ½ lines in to the birthday song, the ENTIRE restaurant started singing with her!  It was totally weird.   But REALLY fun.  The waitress went on and on about how that’s never happened before and how she thought it was so cool that everyone joined in.  I must be loved.  :)

I think 28 is destined to be a really great year for me!

Hawaii - Misc

As the last post in the Hawaii series, I wanted to simply include some of the miscellaneous things we experienced.  (all of these photos were taken with my iPhone, so they aren’t nearly as good a quality.  Sorry) 

One of the main reasons we went to Hawaii was to meet our newest nephew, Asher.  He was born one month before we arrived, and he was SUPER cute.  He pretty much slept the entire time we were there. 

Uncle Blair naps with Asher.

Another day we went to eat Snow Ice. 

It’s VERY different than anything I’d ever had before.  I went in thinking that it was going to be similar to shave ice…or maybe ice cream.  But, it wasn’t.  It was SUPER tasty. 

The “snow ice” part actually looked like pulled pork, to me.  But it melted in your mouth like ice cream.

Another day we went to Coco Ichibanya!  Blair and I had enjoyed this yummy curry while in Okinawa.  It’s one of the favourite restaurants of most of the Americans (and Okinawans) on the island…and it’s a flavor we have definitely missed.  So we made a special trip out to get some.

And it didn’t disappoint.

Mmmmm.

The cool thing was, when we arrived at the mall for the Coco’s experience, we just happened upon a Japanese food festival in another store.   We bought so many fun things that we remembered from Okinawa, like lychee/ melon drinks, and Andagi (little doughnut puffs that they sold in Kokosai Dori).

On our flight back home, Blair told the flight attendant that we had just recently gotten married (at this point, we’d been married 3 months) and she brought us free champagne!  It was good!

I turned mine into a mimosa.  :)

Thanks, Teresa and Clayton, for hosting us and showing us around the island!  It was SO fun getting to meet Asher, and hanging out with all of you for a week.  Love you!

Hawaii - Luau

The second awesome tourist package was a Luau!  We got a great deal on this one too (military deal, not Groupon).  The PolynesianCultural Center puts on an Ali’i Luau which is supposed to be the best on the island.  It was an entire day of activities! 

We got all dressed up in our newly purchased Hawaiian garb (how could you go to a luau and NOT be dressed in Hawaiian attire??) and headed up to the luau.  Notice that the day we decided to go just happened to be the one day that it rained on the island.  Ha! 

 Once we got there, we decided to just walk around and explore for a while.  We found a really cool, super long boat.

The day’s activities included visiting the different “islands” and exploring each unique village life.  It was so cool to see all the diverse cultures and traditions for which each are known. 

They started things off with a boat parade that introduced each culture and the activities you would find in each village.

Aotaera

Fiji

Hawaii

 

Once the boat show was over, we made our way over to “Samoa” and watched a hilarious demonstration on cracking a coconut.  This guy was fabulous.

It took him all of 30 seconds to crack open the coconut, scrape out the meat, and make coconut milk.  I was SOOOO impressed!  Last time I was on the island, Teresa and I did the same with some coconuts we found in her yard.  However, it took us about an hour.  This guy is a pro. 

One hit, and the shell was in two even pieces.

Then he scraped out the meat with a little fork-like contraption strapped onto his seat.  The day before Teresa had shown me a bunch of them on display at her work in the Bishop Museum.  It was really cool to see it in action!

Then he showed us how to quickly make a fire with the coconut husk and a piece of wood.

Then he climbed a giant palm tree in about 20 seconds….barefoot.

Our next village stop was “Aotaera”.  They sang and danced, and did a stick throwing jig. 

Then we got to try it out.

I failed miserably at this task.  lol

We did much better at the stick-throwing, but since we were both using both of our hands, we don't have photographic evidence.  You'll just have to believe me. 

Pretty scenic views on the way to our next village.

In “Tonga”, we tried our hand at tolo (underhanded spear-throwing).  Blair was surprisingly and scarily good at it.  His first attempt was smack dab in the middle of the target. Don't make him mad.

I had really good aim, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it far enough to hit the target.  (but I did better than most of the other people there!)

Then we bought hand-made head leis in “Tahiti”.  Blair’s had a really cool fish on top, and mine had beautiful and sweet-smelling plumarias.

Next stop:  dinner and a show.  They gave us leis as we walked in.  :)

Another picture I heart of the two of us!

 Our pig for dinner.  :)

We thought the show at dinner was THE show.  We were wrong.  Afterwards, we were  escorted to a really big auditorium for the after-dinner presentation.  It was called Ha...which we found ironic, because the big show we saw in Vegas was Ka.  :)  We weren’t allowed to take pictures of it though. :(

Then we took a picture with our favourite Samoan Warrior, Te’o Tafiti, who did our demonstration earlier.

One last photo before we left.

Such a FUN experience!!!