Hawaii Day 4

Monday was our day to leave our cozy North Shore and head to the Honolulu area.

We left our little apartment at 5:00 am!

We stopped at Leonard's Bakery for some yummy malasadas for breakfast.

Then we headed to our favorite snorkeling spot, Hanauma Bay.

It's a protected place, that you have to pay to get in and have to watch a movie that teaches you how to protect the reef.  We got there early enough that the park rangers had opened up the park, but the ticket booth wasn't open yet.  The rangers told us to hurry inside before they opened the windows and we could get in for free!  Lucky Day!  It got better.  We were so early that they didn't have the movie running yet, so they let us go straight down to the bay.  We were in the water within ten minutes of parking the car!  We were one of the first people there and had some amazing snorkeling.  As the day goes on, it gets REALLY crowded, which makes the fish harder to find.  We were glad we got there early and got hours of snorkeling under our belt before it got busy.

After snorkeling we went to this famous pancake place.  We waited for an hour to eat pancakes!  I think we were the only ones in the whole restaurant not speaking Japanese.

 They were so worth the wait!

Macadamia Nut Syrup = Heavenly

It was like dessert!

 Then we drove to one of our favorite places from our last trip, Pali Point.

There's an incredible lookout.  The pictures don't even come close to showing it's awesomeness.

 Then we headed to Diamond Head by Honolulu.

We pretty much ran up the entire trail.

We needed some exercise after our gluttonous pancake eating.

We made it up in just over 15 minutes.  We felt pretty good about that:)

Because we ran, we were really sweaty when we got to the top.

There was an unfortunately large swarm of bugs at the lookout point and they were sticking to.

I'm not talking one or two bugs.  Imagine ten plastered to your face and ten more on each of your arms. It was so gross!  I didn't feel like involving us in many of the pics at this point, so I mostly just tried to capture the view.

On our way home to the North Shore we stopped at the Dole Plantation and bought our traditional wooden Hawaiian Christmas ornament.  We also got the pineapple soft serve ice cream, because we definitely hadn't consumed enough calories yet.  So yummy!!!