Big Adventures

This past couple of weeks has been filled with big adventures. First of all, the school took all the 4th graders on a field trip. They do it big here. They left at 4:45am on Monday morning and headed to the airport where they caught a plane to the big island of Hawaii and spent the week learning there. Here are some of the adventures Brandon wants to share.

 Here is Jackson, Brandon, Elias, and Donovan. This was the group that spent the week with Jerome Uluave (their chaperone).














This was a turtle they saw on the beach.



This is the map of the big island showing the volcanos.

They found Nemo while they were there along with this caterpillar. Brandon took all the pictures except the ones he is in.

 These were some sharks they got to visit. The one on the left is a blue shark.

 These were tomato plants with 12 inch roots. They were planted in rocks (inside the pot) and dropped into the PVC that had water running through it.

This is the group getting ready to go down and explore the lava cave.

 This was a 3 foot wide tree stump someone had carved a tic-tac-toe into.

 This is Acala Falls. It is 422 feet.


















Here they are headed off on their 4 mile hike through a crater.

This is gold made from the stars.











The brave, brave chaperones on the left and the kids on the right. Brandon is up towards the top in his orange and white Denver Broncos hat and his yellow Denver Nuggets shirt.

These are the two bus drivers from the big island that took them around for the week dropping them off at the airport to fly back home on Friday morning.

They got back to Laie about 1:00pm and Brandon got home, went to his room, fell on his bed and slept for about 3 hours. Then he woke up and ate dinner and went back to bed and slept all night...they were really worn out after the big trip.

Next, Cory and I spent the past two weeks in classes to get our scuba diving certifications. On Saturday, we completed our last open water dive and passed all the tests and skills to get our Open Water Certification. We can now dive down to 60 feet in the ocean. The next step would be to do the advanced course which would consist of 5 more dives including an underwater navigational dive, a deep dive too 100 feet, and 3 other specialty dives of our choice. We are considering it because there are a number of ship and airplane wrecks in the island here that we could dive down to and see if we have that certification that would allow us to go to 120 feet.  Most of the wrecks are around 110 feet, but some are less. Anyway, we'll see what happens.

This is Cory and I at 25 feet depth after having finished our certifications. Our instructor took the picture for us. I'm on the left and Cory is on the right

We also had the wonderful opportunity to have our neighbor come over. Denver and TereTau'a came over one evening and it ended up being a jam session. Here is Cory singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.  Denver picked up the ukulele and followed him. So as to not be left out, Brandon grabbed his violin and picked out the melody as Cory was playing and singing. Here it is.

Here is Denver and his wife Tere. They explain a little about how the guitar got to Hawaii, how they tuned it, and then they explain the song they will sing and sing it.

Our last adventure was going to watch Dixie State play BYU-H in basketball. They were playing for first place in the division. They both had one loss. We were cheering for both teams and it was a very close game. Dixie won in the end by one point as BYU-H missed their last shot which would have won the game for them. It was a lot of fun.

So our weeks have been fun and busy. We are enjoying our new home.