Nice place!

We are staying at the Marriott in Ko Olina on Oahu. Nice place!  This is a view from the pool area looking up at the hotel. We are on the ninth floor and have an awesome view of the ocean. I'll try to catch one of their famous sunsets from our lanai in the room sometime this week. We have a beautiful west-facing ocean view. 

Oh and we've already had a guest in our room. Max noticed this little guy behind the tv earlier. He convinced him that the lanai was a much better place for him. Grin. 

First look

The first look of the island of Oahu. We saw a submarine pulling in!   And no, I couldn't get a pic of that as my phone was already turned off for landing. Darn!

My view.

My view for the last 8 hours. We are on a 777. Headed where??  Hawaii, of course!  :)

Flights.

Sitting just in front of us on the "puddle jump" leg of our flights are a dad and his young son (I'm guessing the kid is around 6 or so). We passed through broken clouds on approach to landing in Houston. And I heard him say,

"Cloud storm!  Look Dad, we are flying through a cloud storm!"

Grin. I guess it is all in your perception.......

Sunrise at the airport

Alarm went off at 4am. McD's breakfast at 5.15am. Sunrise at the airport. Do we know how to vacation, or what?!?!

The long drive home

I'm a little late in getting this one posted.  We actually drove home yesterday.  How can sitting in the truck for 5 or 6 hours make me so tired??!!  :)  To give you an idea of what our caravan looked like....  here are a couple of pix.  This is the O's portion of the train.....

And this is the Z's portion of the train......

Now add ours (minus the boat!) and you have a pretty good idea of what our train looked like as it wound through the hills of Missouri and flatlands of Kansas.  There was actually one other piece of the train (complete with fifth wheel and boat), but they got an earlier start than we did.  I'm sure the folks that got behind or in between us said a few bad words!

Last night and today were spent unloading and cleaning the fifth wheel.  She is back in bed (storage) until the next big adventure!

What a great 4th!

What a great Fourth of July!  After a guy-cooked breakfast and a quick trip into Shell Knob, we hit the lake.  The kids rode Super Mable and skiied.  

The adults floated and drank.  :)

And then we did the traditional hamburger dinner, complete with homemade ice cream.  Max created strawberry ice cream and man, it was yummy!

Then we loaded up to go watch the fireworks.  This year we went to a small state park just down the road to watch.  We were so high up on the bluff that most of the fireworks were eye level.  Awesome.    This is what it looked like all up and down the lake.  Last year we would have been one of those boats as we did our viewing from the water.