Hawaii--Final Day

Sigh! We were very sad to wake up this morning knowing it was our last day here, but we dragged ourselves out of bed and went downstairs to finally partake of the $28/person breakfast buffet. We also noticed that overnight, a new mountain appeared just off to the south of our hotel. Magically, on our last day here, my hives also disappeared. Yes, the winds shifted and blew the vog away revealing the Hualalai volcano and taking away the source of my rash.

After breakfast we decided to head out to the beach. We weren't able to get a Waipio Valley horseback riding reservation today so we decided to just relax and enjoy the beach one more day. The waves were a pretty rough, but the beach was fairly empty. We found some huge black crabs of some sort crawling all over the rocks on the beach so that was pretty exciting. We also saw a Japanese chick get rescued by a lifeguard approximately 90 seconds after she'd gone tromping down the beach & into the water with fins, mask, & snorkel on. Our final excitement for the day happened right before we headed in when a college-age looking guy came strolling down the beach in swim trunks with a backpack on & as he walked toward us said "Bud for sale?" Hee! When we didn't say anything he just walked on toward some more Japanese tourists, but I guess decided the hassle of trying to overcome the language barrier just wasn't worth whatever money he may make.

Unfortunately, we will be bringing back an unexpected souvenir from Hawaii--a nasty sunburn. It should make the 13 hour or so trip back home really pleasant!

So anyway, now we're getting ready to check out & then we're headed back to the Four Seasons to eat dinner at Alan Wong's Hualalai restaurant. For those non-foodie readers out there, Alan Wong is the father of modern Hawaiian cuisine--he basically brought it back from the dead. Since I am a foodie dork, I'm really freakin' excited about eating dinner there tonight.

Somehow we have to kill time until we head to the airport for our 10:45pm (that's 4:45am to you easterners) flight back to the mainland. We'll be back in Atlanta around 5:00pm Thursday.