Hawaii

Hello fans.  What else has been going on, you ask?  Well we went to Hawaii.  I know, I know.  You're thinking: Hawaii?  Do something original, Halfstreet.  But, we were anxious to squeeze in a trip before the Halfstreet brother deployed later this fall, and were blessed to have the stars align at work (finally) which enabled us to get away for a week.  This alone was no small feat, as its been a pretty rough summer at the office.  I'll spare you the details.  Or I'll write about them another time.  Sure.

Anyway, the trip was fabulous.  There are lots of pictures.  I won't bore you with them.  Actually it's more the case that uploading them is a serious pain.  But i'll give you a sampling.

First off: The scenery.

Next up: The activities.

The Halfstreet thought it would be good if we tried to mix in some movement on this vacation.  Yes, movement as opposed to my preferred activity...being still.  Preferably on a beach.  With a book.  And maybe a drink.
So to this end, we took a stand up paddle board lesson (enjoyable) and several hikes (less so).  

If I had to sum up the first hike I would use words like: mud, fall (as in down), pain, hard and mud.  And mud twice more, just for good measure.  Here are some pictures.

Much of the trail looked like this.   

 I'm smiling here, but really this should have been a warning

 Notice the mud on me.  Oh, and the scenery too.

 This is where I fell.  You can kind of see my skid marks at the top of the picture.  It was at this point that I might have said "OK, I'm done."  But the HSH encouraged me to go on.  Thankfully, because the payoff...

...was pretty damn cool.

I didn't participate in the second hike, but thankfully the HSB lent his considerable video skills to the effort so the Halfstreet readers wouldn't miss a thing:

as you can see (at about min 1:15), SIL-E and I had better things to do than go on any more hikes!

Lastly a final picture.  Kind of because it was taken in Hawaii, but mainly because it makes me happy.

Mahalo.