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.

Hawaii Trip Recap: Day Six: Kona

I promise we are getting dangerously close to finishing all this Hawaii stuff.

Day 6 takes place on the Big Island in the city of Kona...

Kona has the prettiest, bluest water of anywhere we visited. But, the beaches are all made up of this volcanic rock. Great for pictures. Not so much for sunbathing. We checked out the grounds of the Kona Hawaii temple. You gotta love any temple with palm trees surrounding it.

The highlight of the day came from our visit to the Seahorse Farm. (Sidebar: My own family didn't go to the Seahorse Farm. I went with my adoptive parents and siblings. As you can tell, my own family is a bunch of fun-sucking trip wasters. Haha. I'm just kidding. But really, how can you pass up the chance to see a flippin' seahorse farm! It's a farm of SEAHORSES!!!)
My family definitely didn't get to see this awesome blob fish...
...or all these camo-seahorses.
Seriously, we saw about a kajillion seahorses.
At one point on the tour, we got to try edible seaweed. It tasted like salty grass.
Seahorse kiss!!!
At the end of the tour, we were able to hold a seahorse.
The cute little guy just wrapped itself right around my finger. Way cool!

For some reason, Old Man River in the background was not too pleased about the pasty redhead and his new seahorse friend.

This is me at the restaurant we stopped at for lunch, with our cruise ship in the background. There was no place for the ship to port so we had to take these small yellow boats to get on to the island. That really isn't important information. I just thought I would share it anyway.

Amanda and Bria at the restaurant. You gotta love being able to sip your lemon water at a place with an ocean view and sand beneath your flip-flops. Incredible.
Just another picture of a view you see every second of the day in Hawaii.
There are a million different direction I could go describing these two pictures. But, I will just keep it clean and move on.
Shay ordered an ice cream, but instead received this chocolate and vanilla elephant tranquilizer.
Here I am with Sage, Chalis, and Chyanne, part of my new, wonderful, seahorse-loving family. I'm not sure why they look so great and I ended out the day looking like a sweaty, sun burnt mess. Must be a girl thing.

Hawaii Trip Recap: Day Five- Hilo

I know what you're thinking.

When will this guy shut up about his Hawaii trip?

I understand where you are coming from. But I must press on for my posterity's sake.

We started off the day by visiting the famous volcanoes. Everything was a bit different than I imagined, but once I got past that, I loved it.

See! This is me. Loving. It.

The family took a cute little group shoot in front of all the smoke.

My sister Nika (sometimes known as Ne-Ne amongst about 45 nicknames) took special offense to this sign. It would be tough for anybody to go without food. Even NeNe.

One of the best things about looking at volcanoes is when you get to practice your modeling poses. There was a lot of smoke popping out of random locations.
This tunnel was made from hot lava running through it several (thousand?) years ago. Now it is a pretty sweet cave. Also in this picture, NeNe the butt scratcher!
Inside of the cave, I got my drunk face on.One rule about family vacations: There is always time for one more group photo. Always. Even if it is in some place that you won't remember when you are blogging about it three weeks later. Even if it is just in front of some trees. There is always time.
My favorite part of the volcano experience was hiking down to the bottom of this crater. Mostly because there were only four of us who did it.
Next up, we went to a Hawaiian pizza joint where we played Connect Four and I built this awesome tower from building blocks. It's pretty cool, right? Right?
That is one proud architect right there.
Then came the pizza. As you can clearly see, Nika tried to swoop in for a bite of my delicious veggie pizza. I quickly reminded her about the "Don't Feed The NeNe" sign and how it was my job as her big brother to teach her about following signs and not eating when we are not supposed to eat. So she didn't get any pizza.
Afterwards, we visited the magestic Akaka Falls. There was an old lady in the parking lot blabbering about how the falls is named after her family and that you can find two naked ladies near the falls if you look close enough. Sure, crazy lady, whatever you say.
Here I am next to the good ol' Akaka.This is a picture of me with the improv group Second City, who performed on the cruise ship. They are (L-R) Mike, Deanna, me (duh), Piero, Jen, and Rance. I was lucky enough to be called on stage and have them perform a five minute musical about everything I did that day. (Rance played the part of Cody) It was probably the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. Not only were these guys hilarious, but they were also really cool people. Big ups to Second City!!!

Here is a pic of Bria and Amanda doing the stanky legg on the dance floor. The three of us hit up the dance floor nearly every night we were on the ship. Usually, there weren't too many other people dancing with us. But we had a blast every night. I really miss being able to shake my money maker on a nightly basis.

Hawaii Trip Recap: Day Four- Maui Again

Maui Wowi!

I really just wanted to say that.

Moving on...

Day 4 began with a trip to Lahaina when we happened to see this big dead swordfish. Of course, being a tourist, you have to get your picture next to stuff like this. It's the law. Now when you looked at the picture above, you may have thought to yourself, "Cody, that does not appear to be your family. Who are you standing with?" Well, I'll tell ya. This is the Thacker family (minus Mom and Dad) and they are in definite need of a Paper Badge shout-out. My actual family had one extra person than seats in their rental van and the Thackers had one extra seat than people. So I rode with them. The entire trip. And it was awesome. They adopted me into their family and we did like a million awesome things on the trip that my actual family never did. So there. To sum things up, I had a great family vacation, I just spent it with a different family than I was planning on. Go Thackers! You guys are great!!!

In Lahaina, we sailed out into the ocean in the ReefDancer, a submarine-ish boat which is kind of like that Finding Nemo ride in Disneyland. Only it's real. It is the perfect alternative for anti-snorkelers like myself.

This is what our boat looked like on the inside. Yea tank tops!!!

This is what it looked like when we looked out the window. Yea unknown fish!

There were two scuba divers who would find creatures and bring them up close to our window...

...like this little sea urchin.

The best part of the whole ride happened when one of the divers brought this seven-legged octopus up to the window.
It was really cool. We also saw a few turtles, but I was never able to get a picture of them.
Suddenly, just when things appeared to be going so great, the heptapus attached himself to the diver's face. The diver tried his best to pull the beast of himself, but it was too late. He was doomed. We watched in horror as the heptapus slowly began to suck the diver into his cavernous belly. It was in that moment I remembered something I learned in Mrs. Bowter's fourth grade class: An octopus is your friend until the bitter end, but beware of the heptapus, an enemy to all of us.
Okay, back to reality. Here I am posing next to my trusty steed, the Yellow Submarine.

I took a few shots of the surrounding area from the boat.

Que lindo!
I could make up another story about this sunken ship, but this post is already becoming the longest blog post ever made.
Here I am @ Bubba Gump's doing my best running while sitting pose.
View from Bubba Gump's. Second only to the view from BK Lounge in Logan.
And here I am standing in front of the view. Hey there, champy.

Next, we visited the Iao Valley and Needle Point. The Point is being covered by a tiny branch in the picture. (I am a GREAT photographer!)

Here is it up-close and sans branch.

Look what else we found! Rafiki's tree! Major success!
Here I am with one real sister and two adopted sisters standing in front of the Need. Can you tell which sis is which?
Maui is really really pretty. Like wowi pretty.

Here are two of the real sisters. They are wowi pretty too. Finally, my real sisters, my adoptive sisters, a friend of a sister, my second Mom and I all posed for a picture in front of the Needle. (Who is a mountain, not a sister.)