Oops...Christmas and THEN Valentine's Day!

Since we were going to be in Hawaii and it was our first Christmas together, we wanted to have our own little celebration together. Steve cooked his first turkey! It was excellent and I think we gave most of the bird to Shauna and Pat since there was no way it was going to be good when we got back.

This was our little Christmas tree. We weren't expecting it to be such a bright shade of green, but it turned out to be just what we wanted. It was about 4 feet tall and fit nicely in our tiny studio apartment. We opened presents on the 23rd, which was dubbed as our 'Christmas Morning'.

Christmas Eve dinner.

On the real Christmas Eve, we got up super early to fly to Hawaii! It was a long trip, but so worth it! This was on the beach that Santa Claus rowed into.

This is a pretty spot near the Edwards' home. If you can't tell that we were exhausted...I think we were out after the festivities before Zac was even in bed.
A few days after Christmas we went for a bike ride along the coast. It was such a nice ride--until I overused the breaks on Karen' s bike and went flying over the handle bars! Steve said it looked pretty graceful for the fall! I only came away with kind of a nasty scratch on my elbow, a few small scratches on my hands, and bruises on my thighs where they connected with the bars.

This is Waimea Canyon, on the west side of the island. We took this as a drive more than a hike. We stopped along all of the little lookout points and really enjoyed driving with the windows down and the beautiful sunshine!

This was part of a very beautiful, and rather muddy hike to part of the Napoli Coast. We enjoyed the hike to the beach (where we are standing the in picture below) and I have never been quite so muddy on a hike before. As we were traveling back to our car, someone was actually putting down vines and things to make it less slippery. I'm proud to say that I didn't fall on my butt at all during any of the hikes that we did! The picture just below was by far our favorite picture that we took!

We actually spent a ton of time on the beaches! Part way through our vacation, we discovered that our camera was broken. Luckily, since Steve thought it was broken anyway, he used force to pop the lens back into place and it has worked fine ever since!

This was a pretty lighthouse that we went to see while we were there. We both kind of got super-tans! I still actually have lines from my swimsuit (2 months later...).

On one of our last nights, we got to go to the Smith Family Luau! We loved it! When we got there, they greeted us with leis of shells and then we were given this little tour on a tram around the entire grounds. They were gorgeous!

I loved the flowers, bushes and trees on Kauai. They were nothing like I had ever seen before.

At the luau, we had several people around us ask why, since we were both over 21, we weren't taking advantage of the free alcohol! We just explained that we don't drink! The punch was great, the food was great, the entertainment was amazing!

This was a sunset from Brennecke's beach on our last official night there. It was so pretty and our camera died just as the sun was setting. Boo.

There you have it! We have a bunch of pictures that Brady and Karen took, but not on this particular memory chip. :D