For whatever reason, on this trip we’d left the planned activities to a minumum. We usually have something every other day that we’d booked or scheduled, but for this we left it mostly up to a spur of the moment decision.

This hadn’t worked out so well, simply because you expect Hawaii to be sunny and warm and we had gotten rainy and overcast all week. Turns out that’s what happens when you spend your days on the windward rain forest side of the island.

Hoooowever, Thursday morning the sun was out and the clouds were light and fluffy and I was determined to get  out in the sun! I had been eyeballing a kayak trip in Kane’ohe Bay – you paddle out about a half hour and spend some time on a sunken island – at low tide it has about a foot of water over it, and it’s about 2 miles by 1 mile of sand. We drove down the coast again and rented one double kayak and started paddling!

This was a terrific idea, we had a ton of fun. The sandbar was really neat to see, and it was great to make it there on our own steam. There were numerous tour boats driving in and out of the area, but we got to paddle around, drop anchor, snorkel a bit and then rinse and repeat. We spent about 3 hours on the water, heading back after that long because both of our arms and backs were tired – neither of us paddles very often. 🙂

We got back in the car and drove back up the coast towards our accommodations for our last few nights on the island. Just past the town of Hale’iwa, which is famous for it’s North Shore surf breaks during the winter. It’s a neat little town – big enough to support a huge surf population during the winter, but winding down because the winter season is just ending this week or last.

We found another shrimp truck, Macky’s, and decided that it wasn’t as good as Giovanni’s from the other day.

That night Miranda convinced me to go to sleep very early and wake up very early to get to a beach on the westernmost tip of the island to get an early morning glimpse of turtles. I’m always up for waking up early for something exciting, particularly on Hawaii where we tend to stay on Vancouver time just to be able to do these early morning excursions.

We watched a few episodes of Lost (filmed near here…) and then went to sleep listened to the ocean. Our new place is literally right on the ocean – at high tide I can take 10 steps and be in it.