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Hale Koa with Katie

A year ago, I took Emily to Waikiki and we had a "girls only" weekend where we discussed the facts of life and the birds and the bees and all that.

Well, ever since, Katie has been champing at the bit to have her weekend with me. She's a couple of years younger than Emily was so I didn't quite get into the nitty gritty details the way I did with Emily, but we will cover all that in another year or so. I had planned to do this in January or February after the holidays, but at the beginning of December, the Hale Koa offered 50% off their rooms for kama'aina (people who live on the island) so I jumped at the chance to have a quick vacation in the middle of Christmas.

We hadn't been to the Hale Koa during Christmas before. It was fun to see all the decorations.

We forgot to make our gingerbread houses this year, but at least we got to see the big fancy ones!

The closest thing we get to snowmen.

We walked over to the Sheraton to see their sand sculpture. Last year they had three, but this year there was only the one. Darn economy.

We also went to the magic show at the Hale Koa and
Katie got a balloon animal shaped like an Angry Bird.

One of the things Katie wanted to do the most was to go on the Atlantis submarine ride.

When it came up out of the water, a rainbow was right above it,
like it was our own little pot of gold.

The other end of the rainbow was in Honolulu!

This was my third time on the submarine but it was Katie's first.

It's still really cool to see the sunken ships.
Like viewing the Titanic.

The other times that I've been on this ride, the submarine was packed full of people. You sit back to back with another row of people and if something is swimming past the windows on the other side, you don't get to see it. Too bad for you. On this particular trip however, there were only about ten of us and as critters were spotted on each side of the vessel, everyone would just climb over to the windows on the opposite side and look out of those portholes.

The other times I've been on this submarine, we've seen a good number of fish, but on this trip, we saw an amazing amount of fish. I really couldn't believe it. We saw a school of about twenty huge puffer fish. We saw turtles swimming instead of just laying around and we even saw a couple of sharks swim by! It was even better than I expected and a great ride for Katie!

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