We woke up at 440am to go look at baby turtles at a nearby beach.

While this story continues, please keep in mind that I’m the sort of person who _will_ wake up at a ridiculous hour in order to see something amazing. There’s a finite amount of amazing things in this world (although a large number) and if you miss one, you may regret it.

We’re up and eating hard boiled eggs prepped the night before and granola bars and out the door. Miranda offers to drive, which is nice since my eyes are barely open and I want to study the book to make sure I know where the beach we’re going to is.

“I have a confession to make.”

Uh-oh.

“We aren’t going to see baby turtles.”

G’damnit. I love turtles, and babies are just so damn cute!

“I was thinking about how we always go away for my birthday, but not for yours, so how about we call today your birthday, ok?”

Ooookkkk…

We take a left at Dillingham Airport, which I’m later told is totally a coincidence that it’s 3 minutes down the street from our place. A lot of things are running through my mind – what would we be doing at an airport at 5am? We park the car and she leads me towards a hangar that has a light on, containing…

Powered hang gliders!! Aka, trikes.

We’d looked at this activity some months ago but had dismissed it and had a ton of other stuff we wanted to do, so never looked back. I’m told that Miranda has instead started talking with the owners about how to orchestrate a surprise sunrise flight for me! They had instructions that if I were to call, they would claim to be busy. My lady love did a phenomenal job of keeping this from me, even while she apparently wanted to tell me about it the whole thing. I claim “lies!” 😛

Flying is a funny thing. They can’t give “rides”, it’s not allowed. They can give instruction though! So Denise and Thomas, a husband and wife team who love flying and run Paradise Air, taught us a whole bunch of neat stuff about flying around this end of O’ahu with trikes! These things are seriously badass – like a little motorcycle with a hang glider attached to it, they drive up to 90mph with an accelerator and a bar in front of the pilot to control lift, descent and turning. A lot of principles from paragliding apply, so I had a leg up on the instruction.

We flew down to our last place in Hau’ula, across the pineapple fields at 30 feet, above and over the clouds along the coast, back along past Sunset Beach and Hale’iwa. An hour of effortless flying, and I got to control the device for the most part (with Tom telling me where to go, via the finest mic/headset combo I think is possible).

I’ve got some photos to post from a DVD, but let me tell you – if you have the time, the money and the desire, do this! So amazing.

We drove home to Cafe Hale’iwa for breakfast and had pancakes! And then…home for a nap. Happy birthday! 😛

Unfortunately, after that both of us were pretty sleepy for the rest of the day. The sort of sleepy where you can barely keep your eyes open, and find that it’s 9am and then 1230 and then 3, when you expect it to be 1230, 3 and 6. We made lunch at our place and then went outside to visit the ocean at our doorstep. It was pretty wavey, with a rocky bottom that made standing in it difficult. After a while, Miranda decided to go in and I went swimming. My goal was to find a narrow underwater channel that I’d seen from the air that morning. I swam for probably 45 minutes through a ton of coral and fish and rocks until I decided I’d had enough, got out and took 7 minutes walking back to where I’d started. Fish are dumb, walking rules.

We drove into Hale’iwa and found the North Shore Tacos truck. We enjoyed their static location in La’ie, and loved their truck just as much. This place is hands down the best food I’ve had on the island, if you’re in O’ahu eat here. We only had a single taco each, as we had a plan to go to Killer Tacos and do a comparison. Science!

First, we wandered through town. I’ve described Hale’iwa previously, and it stands. It has a lot of touristy surf shops, a bunch of knick-knack shops and a ton of restaurants. We wandered in and out of shops and I bought a shirt and Miranda got a neat turtle-themed bottle opener and a present for her mom.

Killer Tacos did not compare. The food was good, but it didn’t hold a candle to North Shore Tacos.

At night we watched a few more episodes of Lost and then passed out from a long day!