We landed in Hilo on Friday afternoon, picked up our rental Jeep and headed to the hotel. First off, the view from our room was amazing. I love Hilo, I love the Kona side too, but Hilo was so nice, sleepy & completely different from Oahu. We upacked and quickly went down for the CarboLoad dinner. Yea, Sarah looooooves some carboloading! Noah was in for a special treat because a real life animal scientist sat right next to him! He was really excited & she was pretty impressed with his knowledge. Kev & I were impressed that a week and a half ago she, who was in her 60's, ran another marathon... in the Arctic. Nuff said, right?
Saturday we picked up our packets, drove around Hilo, up to Akaka Falls and generally just relaxed. I'm so in love with Hawaii. It is the most beautiful place I've ever been and has everything to offer. Hilo was breathtaking and the pouring rain every morning was a welcomed change.
So, 24 hours into vacation Scarlett had pretty much super-glued her cranky pants on. I was changing her Saturday night and she was screaming, which gave me a really great opportunity to see the 3 MORE TEETH she was cutting! OMYSERIOUSLY?!?! Bring on the orajel and tylenol... poor girl, poor us, poor whoever was rooming on both sides of us. :( Needless to say, she/we didn't get very good sleep the whole vacation. Sunday! Run Day! We woke up at about 4AM, the buses from the hotel left at 430 &445. I like the early dark bus rides to races, they're exciting and the energy always gets me really pumped up. We get to the start area and there's a civic center everyone is in, stretching, talking, bagging their things and most importantly... hitting the bathroom up as much as possible before we start. So Kev & I decide we're gonna get in line about 15 minutes before 6, the start time. LOL, we're basically the last ones out! We jog up the hill to the start and hear "On Your Mark..." It was really crazy because quite a few people were still coming out of the building and you kinda could barely hear anything. The start was a true testiment to Hawaii though, laid back. No whistle, no foghorn, just "On your mark, get set, GO!" Loved it. I'm not really sure what to say about the run. I can tell you that it was beautiful and it was so much fun to be accomplishing this with Kevin. We ran through rainforest, by waterfalls, over lookouts, we ran hard and we had a really great time doing it! At least I think Kev did.... I know I did. I'm so proud of both of our times, we came in WAY faster than I anticipated. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I am incredibly proud of myself. I averaged a 9:42 pace and came in 92 out of about 400 total half-marathoners and 7th out of 33 in my age group. Not bad if you ask me, and from that, I have a new goal. I want to place in a half-marathon in my age group before I'm 30. I think it's attainable. After the race, we grabbed a couple of pieces of bread, a drink and
A BIG thank you to Trisha for coming through and watching the kiddos so Kevin & I could both run. It really wouldn't have been the same without him. We owe you big-time girl!
The rest of Sunday was spent trying to move as little as possible so we didn't have to amputate anything, ha!
We spent the last few days traveling all over the island, checking out petroglyphs, ancient villages, countryside, beautiful tucked away beaches, breathtaking lookouts, waterfalls, volcanoes and every nook and crany in between.
Whew.... I think that's it. This was a very intimidating blog and I know I've left lots of fun stuff out but I'm just too dang tired to remember what it was. The important part is that we had a memorable, fabulous & exhausting family vacation!
Check back towards the end of the day & I'll post a link to our pics from the whole 6 days. I think that's a better idea than having a 15 page blog!
One of my fave pics from the whole vacation!
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