Well I finally made my way to a coffee house so I could hop online to do a little work and post on the blog and get the pictures uploaded that I have taken. Instead of tossing the pictures in the middle of the post I’m just going to post them at the end.

Our first day we basically crashed at Mel’s parent’s house all day as we were a bit tired from the previous day’s traveling. The day after that was a Saturday and it was absolutely gorgeous out. 85 and sunny with few clouds, so we headed decided to hit up a beach nearby. Just down the road from the house is a Marriott resort and because Hawaii has state laws about private beaches we could go on their really super nice beaches. There are some pictures below from that.

Sunday was a church day so we spent most of the day tootling around with the family. On Monday Julia, Mel and I decided that we were going to make our way down to Pearl Harbor and visit the USS Arizona memorial. When we arrived there we were met with massive fail. First we found out that you have to pay $3 a bag to store bags(you can’t bring in anything that can contain other items like purses and such). Then we found that they were completely out of tickets for the Memorial. Then we found that they were doing renovation on pretty much everything so we couldn’t even buy tickets to go see the USS Missouri either. So we decided that we were going to go to the Koko Marina Shopping center. We had found out a day or so before that the Kona brewery was also down there so we looked for that as well. We eventually found the Brewery and they have some very great beers there. Mel took a fantastic picture of me that you can see below as well. That night we decided that we were going to wake up early and make it back down to Pearl Harbor early enough to get a ticket to see the Arizona at least. They told us that they were giving out 4500 tickets in the first hour that the gates opened!

We got up early and Mel’s dad dropped us off at 6:30 at the gate. The line wasn’t too long but we found out that the bus tours were going in and grabbing hundreds of tickets at a time and then coming back later with bus loads of people and giving them the tickets. Apparently you can grab as many tickets as you want for the memorial. We scored the first tour and managed to weasel our way to the front of the tour so we were the first off the shuttle boat on the memorial which was awesome. After the memorial we headed to the biggest mall in Hawaii to nab some food and do some souvenir shopping and to meet Mel’s older sister. After all of that we took the bus home.

Today we woke up early and decided to head down to Waikiki so we could hit up a coffee shop and do a little work and push some stuff up to the Internet so that is where we are at right now in the trip.

Tomorrow Mel and I take a plane to Maui for the New Year which should be fantasticly awesome. If you are ever curious as to where we are you can check our location using Google Latitude

More pictures and videos to come.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epXS3f7J9Cc&hl=en_US&fs=1&]