Kona, HI Day 5

On Sunday morning, we were trying to determine all the things that we wanted to do during our last 5-6 days.  It's pretty hard to please 7 adults and a baby, but I made a few calls to see about lessons: surfing and stand up paddle lessons.  We (the "kids") wanted to take surfing lessons (minus Justin who knows how) and the school that I called, the guy said there weren't really any waves today, and he thought Tuesday would be better, but he would call me to confirm later that day.  So Tuesday was tentatively surfing lessons...so what to do today?  I wanted to take stand up paddle lessons, yes, we probably didn't need the lessons, but it was still fun to do.  So the girls (Megan, Lauren and I) and Dad went out with Mom into town to take SUP lessons from Kona Boys.  (Mom was the photographer.)  

Learning about how long the paddles are supposed to be.

Getting ready to hop on (I was probably trying to get rid of my hitchhiker- a gecko.)

Practicing in the calm water with our instructor David.

More practice.

Needless to say, Dad took the first fall (I think he did it on purpose to take the pressure off of us) but we were all quite adept at SUP.

So we headed out to the ocean pretty quickly.

It is very hard work so Dad came back in a little early to keep Mom company.

Lauren on her way back in.

Me and Megan...I had just asked Meg where Mom was.

New SUP experts with David.

So, the other thing that was special during our stay on the Big Island, was this little robot called Evolta. It is a Panasonic robot who was working to complete the famous Hawaiian Iron Man Triathlon.  You can read about the finish time here (and Mom was actually there while Evolta finished the race, while we were out paddling - she took these photos).  And you can see a pretty awesome video about it here. 

Mom also got a shot of the running Evolta crossing the finish line, but she was behind a lot of people so it sorta looks like she took a photo of a bunch of people's feet - not her fault, these photos are great though!

After the 5 of us did a little shopping in town, we headed back to the house to spend some time in the pool and relax for the rest of the night.

I took this photo of our view at sunset.  (I have the rest of my Hawaii recap photos done and uploaded so the posts should be coming up quickly, one after the other.  Also, I'm not posting all the photos I took/edited.  The edited ones you can see by clicking on any photo on the blog and it should take you to my photobucket albums.  All the Hawaii photos are posted on my SmugMug page.)