Hawaii, Day Five

I started the day off with a Nutella Latte from the hotel coffee shop.  It looked beautiful but tasted way too sweet.  

We were just hanging around the hotel, Rob was studying, when Sarah Curl texted to say Dave was bed ridden from his sun burn.  She, however, was itching to get out and do some hiking.  Rob and I decided to join her, which was good because I was starting to twitch from all the sugar in that latte!

Our path for that day was the Manoa Falls Trail, which is through some lush rain forest and ends in a water fall.  Note: when the guide book says "lush rain forest" that means you should dress for walking in the  rain.  We were taken by surprise when it poured the whole time.  Everyone else on the trail seemed prepared with ponchos and umbrellas.

Sarah and I dressed for exercise, Rob dressed for golf. Don't let his cappuccino fool you, it was a tough hike!

That's the waterfall. See the cable behind us?  That's to keep people off the rocks and out of the water.  If you notice in the picture of the map, there is a warning about rockslides and one about Leptospirosis,  a brain eating bacteria that's in the water at the base of the waterfall.  Despite the cable and the large warning signs people were still crossing the cable and getting in the water to get a great picture.  We chose to not risk it.

The way down was a wet, muddy mess!

It was a great little hike, just enough exercise plus plenty of nature.  Since we were the only souls in our party brave enough to face the, um, mountain, we decided to take some pictures to make it look a lot harder than it was.  You know, for hiking street cred.  

I posted a cropped version of this on Facebook. Here's the behind the scene picture of Sarah holding Rob's coffee.

Rob, the intrepid explorer.

After a quick change at the Beachcomber, we adventurous three walked over to Duke's for the lunch buffet.  As she was seating us, the hostess asked what we had seen that day.  I said we had hiked up to Manoa Falls.  She replied, "well then, you definitely need some hula pie!" Alrighty then!

chocolate cookie crust, macadamia nut ice cream, hot fudge, toasted mac nuts, whipped cream. Whatever, I hiked to a waterfall.

After the little piece of pie, I think I passed out with a food coma.  When I woke up, Rob wanted to go swimming.  I thought it looked like rain, but he said it would be fine.  The Tices were swimming at the Hale Koa, so we set out to join them.  Halfway there it started to rain.  Because, you see, I haven't told you about the tropical storm that was set to hit the islands the next day.  And the outer bands reached the island right at that minute.

We persevered and reached the Hale Koa pool.  It was still raining, but what does that matter when you are swimming?  Luckily, the pool has a little bridge, so the four adults got out of the weather while the kids did their thing.  The Hale Koa actually still does "adult swim" for 20 minutes every hour, so the kids sat under the bridge for that.

We started to get hungry and Rob was in the mood for sushi.  After a whole lot of googling and review reading, we headed out into the rain.  I'm not sure where we were headed, but we got as far as Roy's Waikiki, noticed they had sushi on the menu, and decided to stop walking and dry out.  

Dinner was amazing.  It turned out there wasn't much sushi on the menu, but Rob got a fancy roll.  I got the tasting menu with Macadamia Nut Mahi Mahi.  It was so good!  When it came, it was on a bed of spaetzle.  I wish I could make the lobster cream sauce.  Oh man, I want to go back and eat that dinner again.  The tasting menu came with their signature chocolate lava cake, but I asked to substitute the pineapple upside down cake.  I'm so glad that I did, because it was delicious.  

I think that we went right to bed after that.  I can't remember exactly.  Did you notice that I had dessert twice this day? 

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