Week 4 Day 23 Life on Oahu

Week 4 Day 23

Honolulu, HI 21.3000° N, 157.8167° W

Hello Friends!

We’ve had a great week celebrating Tom’s Birthday which was Wednesday 9/11!

We finished up our stay at the Hale Koa last Thursday and have been living with Tom’s college buddy Chris and his roommate Mikey in Waikiki since.

They have been doing a great job showing us around town.

We have been enjoying living as locals and part of that has been partaking in crossfit at CrossFit Oahu.

I may have had a couple too many Upside Down Mai Tais this week thanks to our wonderful hosts, but as Mikey likes to say, “I’m sorry, I’m not sorry.”

We’ve WOD’ed at the beach and at their facilities which are very nice.  I highly recommend checking it out if you are in town.

Saturday we got to experience a locals only (mostly) experience climbing up the Stairway to Heaven.

One of the things we have noticed about being locals in Waikiki is that the cost of living is very high.

In order to stick to our budget we’ve been mostly cooking at home, but when we do feel like going out we’ve been scoping out some of the diverse ethnic food the area has to offer.   There is Moroccan, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc, etc, but our favorite so far has been the Pho places!

The Pho in the area is not only everywhere and very inexpensive, but it also is some of the best Pho I’ve ever had!

We spent Sunday morning resting our tired legs watching football.  The nice thing about being in Hawaii is all the games are over early!  We caught the Seahawks and the Patriots at 7am, watched some of the afternoon games around 10:25, and then made breakfast and decided to go do more with our day.

We drove out to the North Shore to see what life is like laid back Hawaiian style.

The scenery on the North Shore is gorgeous.

We saw a million different types of trees, including this one that had multicolored bark!

Surfers are attracted to the North Shore because the waves tend to be biggest there.  We checked out the surf, and then headed to Hale’iwa to check out the town.

When we arrived there was a little farmers market going on in the town square.  We watched some Hula dancing, walked down the small strip, got an Acai Bowl, and decided we had really seen all the North Shore had to offer.

On the way back we decided to play tourist and stop at the Dole Pineapple Plantation.

It may be a tourist trap with lots of over priced Pineapples, (Pineapple in Hale’iwa was $5 and they were $6.25 at Dole.) but we still had a lot of fun.

The grounds are gorgeous and have many different types of produce from pineapples to cocoa leaves.

We opted out of doing the train ride around the plantation, because we didn’t feel like waiting in line; but others told us it was fun to hear the Dole story and see more of the property.

Monday we had a pretty chill day, laying low to get work done.  The highlight of the day was probably seeing this man bird whispering on our run through the park.

This may seen somewhat eccentric but definitely not the weirdest thing we’ve seen in Hawaii.

Since we’ve been here, we’ve noticed daily the large amount of people who like to yell profanities carry on very loud conversations with themselves.  We haven’t done any scientific studies as to why this population is so large on Oahu, but it is definitely something we have observed way more than we would have  expected.  

Tuesday we headed back over to Kailua  for me to teach at Bikram Yoga Kailua Beach.  I taught the 4:30/6:30PM on Tuesday and the 6/9Am on Wednesday.  

The bus wasn’t going to get me from Honolulu to Kailua in time to teach Wedneday morning so Tom and I decided to have our first camping trip on the beach in Kailua. 

Everything went great with the tent.  We had it set up in less than 10 minutes.  It rained on us in the middle of the night, but I am glad to report that our rain jacket was awesome and we didn’t get wet at all!  The sandy beach made a pretty soft bed too. 🙂

Wednesday night was Tom’s actual birthday!  He’s finally caught back up to me again in age!

After a pretty long week of being on the go, we decided to take advantage of an opportunity to lay low and cook at home.  I made Tommy some stuffed burgers over onions, peppers, and spinach (gotta get Tom his Teins!) and we watched a Vin Diesel movie.  May not sound too exciting, but then again you probably don’t know how much Tom likes Vin Diesel.

We’ve got almost one more week left here in Oahu before we head to Maui.  I’m teaching 2 more classes over in Kailua today while Tom does some work in the local air conditioned coffee shop.

 

We hope this past week has treated you all well!  We miss you all!

Leave us a comment and tell us the highlight of your week!