Awesome Vacation Day 5

We started off the day with pancakes for breakfast! After breakfast we attended BYU Hawaii graduation. You know you're starting to get used to the heat in Hawaii when the air conditioning starts to feel cold. So anyway, everybody wears a lei to graduation. Students and faculty. After the graduation ceremony we wandered around the campus a bit, stopping for some pineapple juice and cookies. The administration building (I think) had this huge mural up on the wall representing Kapi-olani, who defied the local volcano deity Pele, stating that her god (Jesus Christ) would protect her. She lived.


Here we are enjoying the beautiful campus. And we just couldn't resist the second picture. Tradition, you know.


Next we went out to lunch at Giovanni's. Shrimp. Yum. Very messy. I didn't really dare touch a camera with such dirty fingers. We signed the truck, which must be painted nearly every week to keep up with the number of people signing it all the time. But it's tradition. We stopped at a local produce stand to try some papaya, grapefruit, apple bananas, and freshly sliced up coconut. My favorite was the coconut, followed by the apple bananas - they had more flavor than regular bananas.


Then our friends dropped us off one beach up from Hukilau Beach and we walked along the beach until we found a spot where we wanted to swim. It was the perfect day at the beach. The sun was warm, the water cool, the waves were big enough to knock you over if you weren't careful. It looked just like this.


Dan thought it was funny to let the waves roll him back and forth in the shallow water - it looked like he was stuck in a spin-cycle. I liked falling into the oncoming waves only to have them drag me back upright. And we even saw a sea turtle swimming about 30 yards off-shore.

After we had been swimming a while, our friends came out with us. They headed back as it got close to dinner time, and we reluctantly packed up, showered off, and followed their tracks towards home. There we had Hawaiian haystacks with fresh pineapple for dinner, did a bit more laundry, and watched some Pride and Prejudice. Well, I did. I think Dan went for a book or something at that point.