Hawaii Day 7 (Thurday)

Thursday morning we woke up still pretty tired and without any specific plans for the day. That was the best part of taking a long trip to Hawaii. We had times to do some things twice and have more mellow days. We had plenty of things on our list of things to do, so we were never bored. As we were getting ready for the day, Mark couldn't find his toothbrush and realized that he must have misplaced it. After searching around out hotel room, I finally found his brush...


Needless to say, we actually just left the toothbrush in the garbage and just shared mine for the rest of the trip. We decided that we wanted to go on a hike and looked through our list of potential hikes and decided on Manoa Falls. And we were so glad that we went! It was a really fun hike, very different from the other hike we had taken before. There were some people on this trail, but not very many. The hike went through the jungle and undergrowth. It was just beautiful. The only downfall was the fact that the trail was a bit muddy, so our shoes got pretty dirty, but it was so worth it. Also, it did get pretty warm while we were hiking, but that's just Hawaii for you.




Can you see how muddy the trail got?



Mark wanted to find the biggest leaf on the trail and I think we found a good candidate here:


After our hike, we went back to our apartment, but not before picking up some rubbing alcohol and more bandaids for Mark's foot. We cleaned out his wound and reapplied bandaids, followed by our lunch of rice and eggs. We were still feeling low-key so we hung out, watched some tv, and read until about 3 pm when housekeeping called to see if they could clean our room. We decided to go check out the Foster Botanical Gardens. We got to the gardens at 3:30 and turns out it closed at 4:30. That was the perfect amount of time for this though. We took a self-tour and saw plants from all over the world.


Yep, there's a cannonball tree, which you can see below. You can also see the sausage tree. Such craziness.



We then drove up to Punchbowl, which is a military cemetery near Honolulu. We walked around and saw some of the more famous graves.

We then headed back home and had to stop by Rainbow Drive-in for some BBQ steak. Mark watches the show Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives on the Food Network and had seen this place, which just happened to be by our hotel. We would pass it every day and Mark thought he had recognized it. The food was really yummy.


We also picked up some pastry desserts from Zippy's, a store we kept seeing all over the place. We ran home and quickly changed into our swimming suits, grabbed our towels and books, and headed down to the beach. We sat on the beach and read as the sun set and it got darker outside. Eventually we were just reading by the light of street lights. After it got too dark to read, we laid out and chatted and listened to the band who was playing cool cheesy music at the restaurant nearby. We then walked down the beach to the International Marketplace, where they have lots of stalls with souvenirs to purchase, before heading home for the evening.