Beaches

I love beaches...in fact, when I need to relax, I imagine myself sitting on a warm beach listening to the lapping and crashing of waves. This does not count John's clock's feeble attempts to imitate wave crashing to help relax someone. For some reason, they only make me more agitated. I have to actually be on a warm beach. I have dreams of retiring on a warm beach - thankfully John is on board with these retirement plans.

Anyway, the wonderful thing about Oahu is not only are the beaches warm, they have a wide variety of beaches. We started out on Waikiki where you can find lots of people strutting their stuff (I did no such strutting) and the waves are perfect for surfers. (See posting below)

We then made our way over to a really rocky side of the island. We were going to hike up to the top of this area and see a lighthouse, but some locals told us to go around the bottom and see the tide pools. What they forgot to mention to us was how rough the water is around here and how quickly the water moves when the tide is coming in. We started hiking along on the cool rocks supposedly looking for whales (yes, the locals said we might be able to see whales), when the water started crashing into the rocks really hard. I could just picture us crazy tourists getting caught with the tide coming in on our first day in Hawaii! We skedaddled our way back as quickly as possible and made it safely, albeit a little wet.

We made our way up to Hanauma Bay, where there are tons of cool fish. We went snorkeling and laid out on the warm sand listening to the waves - though they were a little further back, which gave us the perfect opportunity to see the reefs and cool fish.Then we discovered the beaches on the North Shore where the waves were incredible and the surfers amazing. The beaches were long and sandy and very beautiful. The beaches over on the east side of the island were also amazing, but a little more rocky and we had some incredible views of the mountains.

Visiting so many wonderful beaches has only reaffirmed my retirement desires. No cold beach for me - warm beach here I come! I guess I better start saving up my pennies now.