A Little Bit of Calm...

Aric let me tag along on a work trip to Kona, Hawaii last week. It was so nice...so so nice.

We went on a tour of a Botanical Garden...

We saw some crazy huge/ugly spiders...

We had the most amazing and informative tour guide named Daniel...

These are a just a FEW nuggets of information we learned from him:

There are no snakes in Hawaii, just weird little salamanders that don't have legs or eyes the size of an inch worm.

Sugar cane is no longer the main crop in Hawaii. Corn is.

The Hawaiian language only has 13 letters in it's alphabet.

Every word in the Hawaiian language ends with a vowel.

Cashews come from a poisonous plant. 

White sand is coral that fish eat then poop out.

The last earthquake moved Hawaii 8 inches closer to Japan.

There are 3000 different kind of palm trees.

This is actually a giant cactus, I was too busy taking this funny picture of Aric to listen to what Daniel was saying about it.

This is just a sampling of what we learned from him...we spent six hours with the guy. Our brains are still trying to process it all!

We had lunch at this beautiful beach...

We went exploring...

And then we went zip lining...

I was so proud of Aric, my scaredy cat husband didn't let his fear of heights get to him at all.

I made up my own pose called the Peter Pan. The tour guides were impressed and now they are going to start doing it.

We ate these super yummy donut things called Malasadas...

We saw random things that made us laugh...like lizards on everything...

And plants growing out of rocks...

Mostly we spent our days doing this...

We played ping pong and I actually beat Aric! It was the first time I beat him...it was awesome. No pictures of the momentous occasion but this picture was taken right before it happened.

We ate some amazing food. We ate right next to these sea turtles...

I was able to go running a few times. It felt so good to be hot instead of freezing. This was the trail just outside our window.

Here are some cool fire tricks...one of these guys came up to Aric and screamed in his face while sticking his tongue out..so hilarious. Couldn't pull my camera out fast enough.

One of my favorite memories was Aric getting called out of the crowd to go up and dance with one of the hula girls. My camera was on the wrong setting so these pictures stink. I did get video of it though.

****

As I sat there enjoying the peace and the sun, I couldn't help but feel like this was the calm before the storm. The pattern of my life has been more storm than calm so I don't take this calm for granted, not for one little second. I took in every glorious minute of every glorious day.

Go away Mr. Storm....Please. Pretty please...I'm not sure I've had enough calm yet.