DATE: Sunday, December 25, 2022

Merry Christmas! I think? It sure doesn’t feel like it. But that’s okay. 😃

First thing this morning, we discovered that Santa had found us! He left some stockings for the kids and we all got matching bracelets to commemorate our vacation.

We then headed down in our matching Christmas jammies to take some pictures on the beach. Another beautiful sunrise as our backdrop. Sonya found some shirts on Amazon that said “Mele Kalikimaka” and the pants were from Old Navy.

We worshiped with the brethren at the Leeward church in Waipahu. Very friendly bunch! We felt right at home. The evangelist was from Missouri and actually preached in Peru Indiana for a little while. We had some common friends. Small world / big family.

On the way back to the “R&B”, we stopped at the Pali Lookout on Hawaii 61 (Pali Hwy). This was one of the first spots I remember seeing when I first came to Hawaii, and my cousin took me on a tour of Oahu.

Then it was back to our place for a Christmas Day family tradition, homemade pizzas! A little more challenging when you’re in someone else’s place, but Sonya did a great job. We even had part of one with some leftover pineapple from yesterday.

This morning, we were throwing around some ideas of what to do this afternoon: Crouching Lion hike, Stairway to Heaven hike, Kalihi ice ponds. On the 1/2 hour drive from the Pali Lookout to our place, we’d kinda scrapped the idea of going anywhere. After our pizza, we just headed down to the beach at our place and hung out, napped, the boys threw a football around that they’d bought last night. It was a nice relaxing afternoon on another beautiful day.

Yesterday, in anticipation of most if not all places being closed today, we’d bought a small amount of groceries to tide us over. Turns out there were still a handful of places open, and we found a food truck, Aloha Shrimp, that was actually about a 5 minute walk from our AirBnB. So we ventured out for dinner. It was… okay. Afterward, we went over to a nearby 7-11, which was still open, for some ice cream to watch a movie with.

We’d heard earlier from a local that at night the sea turtles come up on the beach to rest. After the movie, some of us went down to see them. It was pretty impressive, although the pictures aren’t that great. They were definitely annoyed with our taking pictures of them and headed back into the ocean, waiting out our leaving.