Little Black Guidebook

Home sick, being brought tea by hubby. Soon I’ll be up for a tea party…I hope. Ugh.

Photo: Paul Joseph Hopper

Uploaded by mrtwism

If you look at the tagline for this blog you’ll see that it is about making life an adventure. To me making life an adventure means that I do things that are sometimes outside my comfort zone. In Hawaii this meant trying scuba.

I swam in high school and snorkeled before, but had never tried scuba. I didn’t want a big group class, but I didn’t want to spend too much either. I ended up finding a structural engineer on sabbatical who is a professional scuba diver and under-water photographer in his new-found free-time. He teaches through Deep Ecology on the North Shore of Hawaii.

Deep Ecology is a full-service, five-star PADI Dive Center and a National Geographic recognized dive center, located on Oahu’s famous North Shore in historic Haleiwa. In addition to the classes they give they participate in environmental activism activities such as turtle rescues, ghost net recoveries and the creation of the North Shore’s first marine sanctuary.

Our intro to scuba class was held at Shark’s Cove on the North Shore. (so named because of the shape of the rock formations in the caves not because of the number of sharks) There were a bunch of other classes out there that day, but most of them were groups of 6-8 whereas ours cost no more and was just the two of us and the instructor. Also, they were all out of the water before us and didn’t go as far away from the shore. Since we weren’t held back by whoever was the least comfortable in our class we got to progress a lot further in our class, learning a few extra skills including confined diving in a lava cave with sea turtles.

After our class we chatted with our instructor about life on the North Shore, being an engineer in Hawaii and got a lunch recommendation. If you’re ever on the North Shore of Oahu with a hankering for Mexican look up Chollos Authentic Mexican. They have the best nachos and margaritas. I would drive the hour from Waikiki just for their nachos. Hubby loved their mojito as well.

I will admit I freaked out a little bit before getting used to it. But looking back it was one of the most amazing things I’ve done in a long time. We saw so much wildlife and a totally different view of our world. If we get another chance to go back to Hawaii we’ll definitely try and do our Open Water dive certification in 3 days.

Cost $109.00 for 1/2 day of scuba. $20 for lunch.

Hawaii | Oahu | Foster Botanical Garden | Cannonball Tree, originally uploaded by Aliaaaaa.

Today was the last day of the vacation together part of the trip. Tomorrow hubby reports for duty and I’m off exploring on my own. The navy lodging on Ford Island where we are staying has free wi-fi so I figured I would check-in.

So far we have gone sea-kayaking, taken an intro-to-scuba class, driven around the island, visited a Macadamia Nut Farm, and taken a few walks on the beach.

Today we wrapped it up by going to the Foster Botanical Garden. This small garden would have taken 20 minutes to walk through and wouldn’t have impressed us much without the guided tour. It has a small orchid garden and butterfly garden which were nice, but the rest was a lot of trees and non-flowering plants. However, these plants were really interesting when you take a tour with a botanist. We spent 2 hrs, just the two of us with a botanist taking us through the entire garden. I had no idea that there are over 4,000 varieties of palm tree or how so many of our spices are grown. The Foster Garden has daily tours at 1pm each day which are well worth the time. Typically the tour runs 1-1.5 hrs ($5 for non residents), but tourism is down so it was just the two of us so we got to go into far more detail, it was super cool.

The food has been fabulous and we’ve enjoyed every minute. I’ll post more later on the first two days of the trip.

Here is a slideshow I found on Flickr of the Foster Garden we were at today. It is from photographer Alia Luria who has a Creative Commons license on her work. She has a personal blog here. Thanks Alia, you perfectly captured the garden.

These are so cute you can actually imagine leaving them out on your desk year round. Pencil holder anyone? But today I imagine one wrapped in my hands warming them as I sip some mint tea. Soon I won’t need hot tea to warm my hands. Hawaii here I come. Have a cup. It revives you.

From the UK’s Mirror Mirro (12 GBP).

Hawaii Packing List by lisetiffner

I can’t post our itinerary here ahead of the trip because hubby reads the blog. The first three days will be just us, then we have an Army Family Programs event and then he has his Army commander’s conference. He’s so stressed about the Army part that he doesn’t have time to think about the vacation part so I am surprising him and planning everything. We leave tomorrow night and I am super excited. Right now in Alaska the leaves are yellow and the temp is in the 60s so it will be nice to warm up.