paddle, paddle, sip

on a side note, there is a lady just outside our hotel who sells beautifully crafted hair flowers!  i'm obsessed.  i plan to get one every night!  single ladies sport a bloom on the right, married gals on the left.

for sunday, logan and i decided to go ocean kayaking!  part workout, part sea-bonding, all made better with beer.  we got a pretty late start in the morning compared to our usual up and at 'em at 7 a.m.  we mosey'ed on over to gobananas around 10 a.m. and rented a tandem kayak.  the stoner kayak rental specialist highly recommended that we purchase and tote along some beer to "help weigh down the craft and prevent capsizing."  always one to follow instructions, logan stopped us at a convenient little store along the way and we snagged some tall boy BLLs.  life vest - check.  hair flower - check.  beer - double check.

as suggested by our thuper thecret hawaii guidebook, we decided to paddle out to a little-known site called sunken island.  this little gem is the result of ice caps melting thousands of years ago causing a rise in sea level.  what was once a thousand acre beach is, well, still a thousand acre beach - it just has about a foot and a half of crystal clear water on top!  we kayaked about a mile off shore to reach sunken island then got out and walked around for a bit.  this has got to be one of the most photogenic spots in all of oahu.

so this was super enjoyable for the view and also because logan kennedy cracks me up every damn day of my life.  if only his jokes were family friendly, i would repeat them here.

being the ambitious vacationers, we reached land again and immediately went in search of other great kayak locations.  we visited a few more beaches but eventually decided that i was we were just too tuckered out to venture out again.  we thought about doing surf lessons, but again, the tiredness won out.  ultimately we spent the afternoon driving up one of the mountains along the famous tantalus drive, which is an amazingly twisty road that snakes through the jungle/rain forest (not sure what it's called here.  for that matter, what's the dif between rain forest and jungle?  i remain confused.)  at the top we got a mesmerizing view of honolulu.

for dinner we decided to go fancy and hit up one of the resort restaurants.  sigh.  there are few things on earth that make logan kennedy angry and a foodfail is one of them.  i thought the place was pretty neat - it's directly on waikiki beach with an open, patio-style atmosphere.  the weird thing was that they had a below average salad bar, and for the entree you picked a meat from the menu and the server brought it to you raw.  once the server finished explaining, logan looked at me and said "i do not go to restaurants to cook my own food.  this place is dead to me."  so we took logan's raw, terriyaki-drenched chicken up to the grill and commenced to cooking our own dinner.  my hat is off to the owner of this resort who very skillfully saves undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of dollars on chefs each year by making guests cook their own food and calling it an "experience."  but you don't fool logan kennedy, sir.