Underwater boat ride and other adventures

Every day here starts and ends the same way: turtles popping their heads out in the bay right outside our lanai. If you look closely you might see as many as 8 or 10 at a time! They are the most active in the early morning and at dawn. They come up for air and swim on the surface for a while then go back to the bottom.

We cooked and ate our breakfast on the lanai today: eggs, bacon, toast and papaya. Every meal here has some kind of fruit involved. So today we went out to a local outdoor mini-market and bought a bag full of fruits: papayas, pineapple, mangoes, avocados, bananas. I have to say that fruit here taste like heaven, so sweet and juicy that when we eat them, the sweet juice drips down our hands. This is paradise for me- I love fruit!

In the morning we went out on a Reefdancer- a boat where you sit on the bottom level full of glass windows so it seems like you're sitting under water. First of all, Dave forgot our tickets at home and we wouldn't be able to make it on time but the nice people on the boat let us on it anyway. We got very lucky! While on the boat we saw many different fish, a sea cucumber, an octopus, and some creature that looked like a hedgehog in a ball- I'm really not sure what it was!

After this trip we had a delicious meal at Cheeseburger in Paradise (although they did manage to sell us some mugs but we had no idea we were buying them... oh well). Then we did some very successful shopping on Front Street- we bought out one of the stores completely and they gave us a huge discount because of it :)) At least now we have tons of necessary (and not) stuff and souvenirs!

When we came home everybody went upstairs and I decided to go take one more picture of Bird of Paradise on our property. Intuitively I walked along the shore and saw some people staring into the distance. I saw a boat there and thought nothing of it but kept looking. Suddenly, I saw a whale!!!!!!! He was dancing in the water straight ahead of me showing off his fins and back and blowing water. I've seen whales before but I got very excited. None of the family was answering my phone calls so they missed the show. I sat there on the grass and some ladies said I just barely missed a school of dolphins that passed by as well, they were jumping out of water and doing 360! I can hardly believe it myself so I'll have to sit there more often now so I can see it with my own eyes!

In the evening we went to the beach. Alex and Babulya were swimming by the shore and Dave and I went out snorkeling right there on the beach. O MY GOSH! Never have I seen SO many fish before and trust me, I've been snorkeling before in many different places. I bet we saw close to 100 different types of fish in 30 min that we were out there, including puffer fish, a long stick fish, tons of Humuhumunukunukuapuaa's, and fish of all colors, shapes and sizes imaginable. It made me wonder why would people pay big bucks to snorkel at Molokini (we've done that and it was fun but not comparable to our snorkeling tonight) when you can go outside your condo, get fins and masks on and snorkel on the beach for free! I'm still amazed. By the way, we snorkeled at the Napili Beach, the one close to our condo.

When we got home we decided it was going to be a bucket-of-chicken kind of night and Dave went out to get us some KFC. We'll see what tomorrow brings!