ALOHA!

Yay, the condo has wireless access! So updating our travels from the last post, we drove from Debbie's house back to Glendale on Sunday. We hit some end of the holiday weekend traffic, but made it to Grandma's house in about 4 hours. We all ate dinner at the food court at the Glendale Galleria so everyone got to eat what they wanted. We dropped Grandma off at home, picked up a couple of our suitcases, then headed to LAX. I returned the rental car Sunday night (smart move!) and we were in bed around 10:30 pm with everything packed.

We flew to Oahu on Monday and everything went well. The flight was a little less than 5 hours and we managed to get the rental car (remind me not to buy a Chevy Uplander minivan - no offense if you have one) and get to our condo by 3:30 pm. We unpacked a few things and then went in search of food. Ate dinner at Chili's and picked up the essentials for breakfast and lunch at Safeway.

Today we went to the lagoons at the Ko Olina resort where we are staying. The Johansson boys and mom Kristin joined us and they had a blast playing together in the water...like no time had passed at all. We came back to the condo for lunch and clean up. Then we took off on an expodition to find our old house and explore the North Shore. Our old house in Mililani is in great shape the neighborhood looks the same. Not much has changed on the North Shore, beautiful beaches and the best Shave Ice! We ate pizza at Pizza Bob's in Hale'iwa and Mark and I stood in the parking lot afterwards feeling like we never left this place (did I mention no one drives more than 60 mph on the freeways?). Definitely a different pace.

The boys got a bit of a sunburn today even with sunscreen on so we are taking a break from the beach tomorrow and going to the Arizona Memorial and USS Missouri. The boys were fascinated by the whole story of the Arizona and the war with Japan so we had a lengthy history lesson before bed tonight and looked up some info and photos on the web.

We picked a great week to be in Hawaii, it is the annual RIMPAC exercises for the military and there are planes and ships here from all over the pacific rim. There were F-18's and F-15's flying over the lagoons today preparing for the war games. Mr. Johansson is planning a tour of the tower and a P3 aircraft at Kaneohe Marine Base on Saturday for us and his boys.

Mark and I are now trying to figure out what conditions would allow us to move back over here again and how we could pull that off and not have to work - I say LOTTERY! (Just kidding about the move part!)

Hope all of you are having a good week. New photos from the last couple of days are on the Picasa site (link is on the right side of the blog).