Hawaii Recap: Days Seven-Ten: The End

(Cue the collective groans of everyone who reads this blog)

I know, I know, I know. I have been back from this trip for longer than a month and I am still blogging about it. But, I am almost done, I swear. I promise this will be the absolute final blog post about this trip. To make it happen, I have combined the final days of the trip into one comprehensive post. Let's get this over with.

In this picture, you can see my sister Bria flexing in a green top. This is at a cool little pond on the island of Kauai. They had cliffs, a rope swing, and the view was just beautiful.

On the walk back to the car, I decided to add some pictures to my Abercrombie portfolio...

...until Nika couldn't resist the chance to photobomb me...

...she has maneuvered her way into this blog a lot lately...

...finally, we got her out of the way and I was able to get my pose on again.

Our ship traveled right by the spectacular Na Poli coast. Apparently, you can only get close up to this area via helicopter. It's another one of those times where a photo just can't do the beauty justice. At all.

Here I am with my parents in front of the great view.

My cruise ship celebrity status reached an apex when I competed in the Dancing With the Stars competition...

...where my partner and I were an absolute disaster. I can't dance and I REALLY can't dance with a partner. So there's strike one. If you look at the picture you can see that I am also wearing flip-flops. Flappy Wappy Flippy Floppys. Strike two, right there. Strike three came in a big way from an incident in the first round. Take another look at the picture and notice the length of my partner's dress. Pretty short, no? During the song "Sway" from Mikey Bub, I went to the go-to spin your partner move. Her dress blew right up and we gave the audience a view they were definitely not expecting. Yow. After that, my partner was so embarrassed that she wouldn't dance. We were on the express elevator to the top floor of the Building of Suck. The crowd cheered us through the first two rounds until we were eliminated (thank the Lord) after round 3.

We met a lot of cool people on the ship. Here I am with Amanda, Bria, and DJ Hurricane Holt.

Bria, Amanda, me, and Chalis with Jasper. He was one of the crew members in charge of the activities that took a special liking to us crazy Mormons from Utah. He is also a crazy good dancer. Speaking of that, Chalis was also in the DWTS competition and she and her sparkly partner took first place!

Here we are with Chris, who served us our late-night peanut butter and jelly sandwiches almost every night on the ship.

Here I am with all my siblings after eating at Duke's in Kauai. We are a cute bunch of Titmuses.

And here is the whole group! Overall, this ranked as one of my favorite trips of all-time. I had a great time, did somethings I had never done before, made some great friends, aaaaaaaaaaand I was in Hawaii. And Hawaii is awesome.

Road Trip Pt.2

This post isn't going to amount to much. I didn't really take many pictures the last two days of my "vacation". The pictures I did take are not very interesting. (Mostly because I am not in any of them.) But, here they are anyway.

Here is our hotel in Frankfurt, Kentucky. I am sure I woke up at least half the guests here at one a.m. from my yelling and screaming during the end of the Jazz-Blazers game. I feel bad, but sometimes you just have to let it all out.

Here is a quick snap of the capitol building in Charleston, West Virginia.


This road was not meant to be part of our journey. We stopped in some city to get lunch and a few confusing roads got Marcus turned in this direction, far away from any restaurants. Luckily, we got turned around and arrived safely at another Applebee's.
Some foggy river.
This is pretty much all my eyes saw for THREE DAYS!!!!!!!!
I thought the name of this gas station (Wawa) was funny. Do you? You should.
The lobby of the Richmond airport. This was at nine thirty in the morning. As you can see it is empty. There were literally fifty non-employees at this airport. There were no lines for check-in, security, gift shop, or the bathroom. If heaven is like an airport, then I have seen heaven. (Sidenote: The hell of airports is Denver, Colorado)

Once I made it back to Salt Lake, we celebrated the birthday of my baby sister, Nika. She is now 16th. I had the intentions of giving her a full post on this blog wishing her a great birthday. Sadly, I failed as a blogger and a brother. This is now four days late, but here it goes. Happy Birthday Nika!!!

Road Trip!

I've been on road trips before, but never anything like this.

For those of you who don't know, I am currently in the midst of a cross-country road trip from Utah to Virginia. My buddy Marcus is moving out there to begin working at an army base near Richmond. It has been bananas to the highest degree.

This is Marcus' car with the U-Haul attached to it. I have spent approximately 34 hours in this car over the past two days.

This is Marcus with his cat, Wally. Wally has also been in the car for 34 hours...

...and he pretty much runs the show.

Our first non-Utah state was Wyoming. Cold, snowy, ugly.

This is how my face feels about Wyoming.

Nebraska brought the first bit of light into our day in the form of Runza, the delicious fast-food restaurant.

We were very pleased with out runzas.

This is our hotel in Independence, Missouri. We had a crazy time getting here. We ran into ice and snow from Lincoln, Nebraska to Kansas City. We got into our room around two in the morning. This was especially awful because we left Ogden at four thirty the morning before. Over 1,000 miles of driving. It was a very long day.

Here is a blurred picture of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis as we drove by. Somehow, at the same time we drove over the Mississippi River without seeing it. I don't know how that is possible, but it happened.

In Illinois, we ate at this hip, new restaurant called Applebee's. I enjoyed the glories of the Quesadilla Burger.

There was a guardian angel watching over us while we ate. I'm pretty sure she has been watching over us for the rest of the trip.

We also stopped into the Special K, where strange things are afoot every day.

(I would also like to point out that we drove through Indiana. It was completely dark and we never stopped. So, no pictures.)

Kentucky brought us the joys of White Castle...

...and their delicious sliders.

I ate 12 of them. I guess I didn't learn anything from the McNugget Incident after all.

49ers game