Hawaii-La'ie Temple

This is the whole reason for our trip to Hawaii. Very sadly it is closed pretty much all year for renovations (which we were aware of ahead of time), but we still got to see it behind the lovely chain link fence.



On each of the top sides is a stone carving depicting figures from New Testament, Old Testament, Book of Mormon, and modern day times. They had small replicas in the court yard with plaques naming each person pictured which was very interesting. Then we just stared at the temple. And we drove by it about 5 more times crossing the area for sacrament, hike, lunch, etc.


Once we arrived I of course found out I had forgotten to replace the SD card after blogging before we left the beach house so we had a total of 11 pictures on the internal drive that we could take all day. It was weird to have to conserve shots again like in the old days of film...the one good thing was if you find something better you could delete an inferior picture. So the ones shown here are the best of the best.

Back to the beginning of the day we started with a walk along the beach. Pictured for the boys are a white crab and a jellyfish.




Then we headed to the temple and a sacrament meeting. The speakers really do say Aloha at the beginning of their talks and the audience answers back in tired, sleepy voices. Also it was weird driving through La'ie because everyone was wearing church clothes in the yards and along the streets...they had like 11 wards we could choose from and the town is not that big. The guys had a great mix of pants, their "skirt" things (sorry I don't know what they are called), dress shoes, sandals, flip flops, etc. The gals just wore dresses and sandals. Nothing exciting.

We had lunch at some shrimp shack and then went on a hike at Hauula Loop Ridge. It was so beautiful on the ridge looking right at my favorite, the Ko'olau Mountains.




Then we decided to drive around the whole island which was a really fun to see all the different coast and beaches and then we noticed on our map that the highway was actually a dotted line at Kaena Point. When we arrived it seriously turned into a dirt road for 2.5 miles around the point which our rental car was not up for. However it is right on the west side and it was about 6:30 so we stopped and watched the sunset with only about 8 other people there. It was very beautiful.