Thursday -- Our Grandest Adventure Day

This picture was probably taken from a boat, but on our helicopter ride we would fly into those little canyons and there were lots and lots of waterfalls back there.  Our pilot would take us right by the waterfall and hover halfway up it and turn in a full circle so everyone could see.  It was very beautiful.
Photo by Jelle de Gier on Unsplash

The Napali Coast is very beautiful.  We loved seeing it from the air, and would have liked
to go and see the inside of the sea caves that we could see.
Photo by Logan Lambert on Unsplash

I call Thursday our grandest adventure day because we actually paid to go on a helicopter ride.  A doors off helicopter ride.  I would have gladly done that every day!  There were four of us and the pilot in the helicopter, and naturally, since I was smallest, I was assigned the seat in the middle -- between the pilot and Derek.  There wasn't even a little bit of fear that I would fall out.  On the contrary, if we were really going to crash land in the ocean (they give flotation devices to wear and instructions to "prepare" us for this), I'm pretty sure it would take me so long to undo my seatbelt and scoot to the door that I'd be too late.  In the movies though, I would have had to take over the helicopter when the pilot met his untimely demise -- which would have been a tragic day for us all since we established before our flight that the girl who had actually done a simulator before would be the best choice for that.

I didn't actually take pictures from the helicopter, and we left our phones in the car so we don't even have pictures of us with the helicopter, the pictures above and the one at the end were taken by other people, but are a pretty good representation of what we saw while flying.  We did go other places that day and here are some pictures from those places.

This was the first day we went to the lighthouse.  We didn't actually go in to the lighthouse at Kilauea and Wildlife Refuge that day.  We just looked -- and took pictures.

I was trying to get a selfie with the lighthouse in the background.  I had to stand on my tiptoes and I kept falling over and laughing and so -- no lighthouse!

This is a zoomed in picture of the birds hanging out on the ridge to the right of where we were standing.

This is a zoomed in picture of the lighthouse -- so it's blurry.  Ok.  Maybe it's blurry because I moved.

Almost everything was beautiful in Hawaii.  The ocean was different colors depending on the light, the weather and the location.  

The beaches we went to were usually not even close to crowded and very pretty.  Of course, there were danger signs everywhere warning you to about currents, and telling us not to turn our back on the ocean -- which is unpredictable.

I was always trying to capture the awesomeness of it all.  The pictures are pretty, but they never capture the awesomeness of the ocean!

A wave :-)

Me and the ocean

Me and the beach and the ocean.  It was a pretty day.  I wore jeans because helicopter rides get cold, especially with the doors off, and because the sun was out here, but it almost always rained at least once during the day.

On our helicopter ride I wore two jackets -- one of which was a wind breaker, and I didn't regret it -- and I was squished between two warm people!  Derek wore a jacket, and his right arm got cold and his right leg was soaked from the rain we went through. 

The water was blue like this in one area and I pointed.  We were wearing head sets with microphones we could use to speak to each other if we pushed a button, but I didn't like doing that!  Mostly only our pilot spoke.  Derek and I just pointed and our pilot was really good at interpreting what our pointing was about and appropriately commenting.  When I pointed at the color of the ocean he said something like, "Yeah, the color is really beautiful isn't it?"
Photo by Natalie Chaney on Unsplash