"Painting Your Nails" Takes on an Added Meaning

Until this week, I'd never done a pedicure before.  Anna tells me that in Hawaii they buy cheap shoes and spend more money on their nails.  Makes sense.  So we went to this nice place and got our pedicures, complete with extra nail art.  I don't think I've seen this before, but they paint little pictures on your toes with tiny brushes.  And they put little rhinestones on, too!

So maybe this is a little weird--but here's my toes.  I love the way they turned out.

Makapuu Lighthouse

Thursday I had the opportunity to go on a hike with a new friend from church.  We hiked around the Makapuu Lighthouse area.  The view from the lighthouse viewpoint was just amazing. 

This is the view looking north.

The Makapuu Lighthouse.  We couldn't go inside; we only looked at it from above (and later from below). 

Heidi graciously took a picture for me. As you can tell, it was really windy up there.

 Afterwards we hiked down the cliff to the rocky tidal pools below.  I know this picture looking up the cliff makes it look really dramatic, but it was pretty steep.  

At the base of the cliff there's a rocky shelf with tidal pools.  The waves crash up against the rocks, sometimes shooting up very high.   

The water in the tidal pools was so clear!

Heidi knew of this neat place where there's a log sticking out into the water that you can jump off.  After getting hot on our hike, a good swim was the perfect thing.  The whole day was a ton of fun.

Diamond Head

Monday we all went to Diamond Head, the famous crater next to Honolulu, and hiked to the viewpoint at the top.  It's a very popular place, so it was different from Northwest hikes where you only see a few people the whole time.  We were surrounded by other hikers.  The crater used to be a military site, and I think part of it still is.  At the base of the crater where we parked we saw these neat old empty military buildings.  Some of us wished we could have gone inside the fence and explored them.

The beginning of the trail inside the crater

A fairly impressive view, but the best was yet to come

After climbing up the inside rim and going through a kind of multi-story bunker in the crater wall, you crawl through an opening in the wall onto a trail that takes you to a lookout at the top. The crowd was pretty thick at the top, but I think it was worth it.

Honolulu

Looking back into the crater

After Diamond Head we drove to the Halona Blowhole and watched it blow repeatedly as the waves came in. 

 

Easter Weekend

On Saturday we had a Passover dinner for 16 people.  We would have had it on Passover, the Monday before, but it didn't work out, so we postponed it.  We joked that it was a "semi-kosher" Passover.  Making everything "Passover kosher" would have been a lot of work.  This was my second Passover dinner and the first time I had helped host one.  It's a pretty neat thing to do.  It makes the history of the Israelite's deliverance from Egypt more tangible, and also reminds us of Christ's Last Supper.  There are certain dishes in Passover which represent different elements of the Passover story.  In addition to those special dishes, we had a normal meal.  I wished that I had gotten more pictures, but here's one of the table for Passover before everyone came.

   

On Easter morning we went to the beach before church to take some pictures 

Anna and kids

Yours truly

We also saw a rainbow on our way to church.

More pics from out and about

This week we took a quick trip over to Ford Island and saw the U.S.S. Utah, one of the ships sunk during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

An old air traffic control tower on Ford Island.

The view from the Pali Lookout on our way to the other side of the island.

On Good Friday we stopped by the beach on the other side of the island before going to church. Anna has asked me to take pictures of the kids, so we took advantage of having on nice church clothes to snap some shots.

Sydney

Mack

Cole

Nora