Shannon's Song: Homesteading at the Hilton Waikaloa

I thought I'd give you some pictures of our hotel since we spent a quiet day exploring the beach and snorkeling the hotel lagoon.

There is a dolphin pool at the hotel where you can swim with them. We lunched next to the dolphin pool just to watch them swim and play.

It's an enormous resort and, not only does it have a tram to take you from one end to the other, but it has a BOAT. I was determined to ride the boat but it got to be the last night and I missed my chance.

The lagoon inside the hotel has fish. My uncle Dean said there wasn't really any need to go snorkeling since these beautiful fish were right there.

This is on the way to the beach where we snorkeled.

Going to Hawaii, I was expecting sandy beaches but it was lava rocks and white coral. Not suitable for barefoot walkin'!

Since we’ve been doing a lot of running around and had yet to get in the water, we stayed around the resort and took Melinda and Dean to the tide pool that had been so exciting two days prior. Well, it wasn’t so exciting today. There were hardly any fish, at least colorful fish, to speak of. I saw plenty of sea urchins and since I was barefoot, trying to navigate coral and sharp lava rocks, I was on high alert for slipping and landing on one. I did find a bone from a cuttlefish, which was cool. Some locals were catching parrotfish for their dinner. Again, see Dean’s blogpost (http://theketelsens.blogspot.com) for a thorough recap of the local fishermen.

Susan, Dean, Melinda and I went to the resort’s lagoon to snorkel. Well, it was COLD in the water and it took us 10 minutes to tiptoe in. Finally, we found beautiful fish swimming near the rocks.

Then I thought Susan was on my left and when I looked, it was a green sea turtle. No, TWO green sea turtles within a foot of me! Susan was on my right and one turtle approached her, and kept approaching her and kept at her, so she ended up backing off.

The other was eyeballing me and it made me nervous so I swam off with Susan. Like Susan said, ”They say not to approach the turtles but what do you do when THEY approach YOU??” So, I’d come to Hawaii to see and, hopefully swim with, sea turtles and I did it!