hawaii | more palm trees, more wedding prep

Larry told me the other day that my blog is becoming the vacation slideshow that no one wants to watch. To him, I say "Tough titty!" Yes, I may be overdoing it with the Hawaii posts, but I'm notoriously bad at sorting through vacation photos and documenting our travels. (Remember that ten day RV trip we took in 2010? No? That's because I never got around to blogging about it.) Our trip to Oahu (and our wedding!) is something that I always want to remember, so I'm plowing ahead...

Now where were we? I had spent the first days of Larry's meetings exploring Waikiki on my own, and after being sunburned and windswept, I was beginning to resemble a lobster with an afro. Not the look I was going for in the days before my wedding, so I was careful to stay out of the sun for the rest of the week.

Instead of lying on the beach, I spent my time walking my feet off. I walked all over Waikiki: people watching, eating delicious food, buying postcards and souvenirs, and taking photos of Naked Man as I went. At one point, Naked Man tumbled over the walkway and onto an unreachable spot on the sand below. Luckily a woman eventually rescued him for me before I had to concoct a believable story as to why I was photographing a clothesless rubber doll and ask the very fit surf rental guys to recover him. Whew. Naked Man then spent the rest of the week guarding our rings in the hotel safe.










I walked to a park at the base of Diamond Head, found picnic tables inside of banyan trees, and wished I could live in there. I took a ukulele lesson. I went to the rooftop pool at our hotel hoping to finally get some uninterrupted reading time, but it was so windy that my book nearly blew away. I drank a daiquiri instead.






In the evenings, Larry and I went out for cocktails and admired the tiki torches along Waikiki Beach. It was a pretty good week.

There was wedding prep to be done as well. Our hotel sent our wedding attire out to be pressed. I spent the week e-mailing back and forth with our officiant, photographer, and make-up artist - confirming times and locations and other details. There were permits to get, and oh, a marriage license! We went to the Department of Health in Honolulu during one of Larry's lunch breaks to take care of this. In retelling the story, Larry likes to say that the most stressful part of getting married was trying to find a parking spot when we went to get our marriage license. (Yes, we almost got into a fight.) He wanted to park illegally and I didn't want us to get a ticket on the day we got our marriage license. Luckily, we found a legal parking spot and thanks to the fastest typist on earth, had our license in hand in a matter of minutes. Sh*t was getting real.

Larry finished up his meetings on Friday, March 1st and our vacation officially started. It was T-minus three days until our wedding day...