Harveys Hit Hawaii - Part 4

Near the end of our trip, Thomas and I accompanied Nancy and Peter on a night dive with the manta rays.  Our scuba skills were a little rusty, but we had a great dive instructor who got us back into fighting form.  We saw a record number of mantas that night due to the excellent feeding conditions - some were over 16 feet tip to tip!

Virginia had a blast putting together puzzles with Mimi and torturing crazy Uncle Dave:

On our last night, we went out to dinner at the fancy restaurant on site at the Mauna Lani, the Canoe House.

And we followed up dinner with a night of singing and puzzles with the family back at the condo:

Our trip home was not without drama, as our flight was cancelled!  We ended up avoiding an overnight delay by getting on a redeye on another airline.  Virginia was dog tired but a fairly good sport....

Harveys Hit Hawaii - Part 3

Our group had quite the collection of beer aficionados, so we gathered a crew and headed to the Kona Brewing Company.  Some of the boys took a tour, and Thomas, Virginia, Chris and I joined them for lunch and beer tasting afterwards.

On the way back from our brewery visit, we stopped at a wide spot on the highway to visit a lava tube - a massive cave formed by cooling lava.  Since this was an unplanned visit, we didn't really have appropriate footwear to be hiking unstable lava, but we managed to make it happen.  Thomas carried a very wary Virginia and we marveled at the size of the cave.  

One of the highlights of our visit was our night at the Mauna Kea luau -- attended by our whole group. We dressed up and drove up the road to this gorgeous resort where we took some more formal photos and ate delicious Hawaiian BBQ.  The mai tais weren't much to write home about, but the show was quite good.  Virginia even got called up on stage to do the hula to the Hukilau song.  Instead of doing the dance, she spent most of the song bossing around two younger toddlers and making sure they were standing in the right place and following instructions.  All the parents in the audience were laughing like crazy.  Then, we had even more reason to laugh when Thomas was brought on stage to do a Tahitian dance! 

Harveys Hit Hawaii - Part 2

One of the highlights of our trip to Hawaii was taking a helicopter ride with Blue Hawaiian.  GayGay babysat Virginia for the morning while Thomas and I accompanied Uncle Steven on an adventure.  We sprung for the fancy Eco-Star helicopter and Thomas and I were lucky to get the two front seats with full panoramic views.  We flew over the active volcano and saw a bit of lava and also visited numerous coastal waterfalls.  And it was my first flight in a helicopter, so I'm glad to have checked that off the bucket list!

We also spent a lot of time just hanging out with family.  Here are a couple of shots of our group getting into the Hawaiian spirit!

Harveys Hit Hawaii - Part 1

In early July, our family attempted the impossible.... 18 of us boarded flights for a mega-family trip in the Aloha state.  This was a bit of a motley crew as our group included Harveys, Neelands, Macks, von Eulers and Fetzers.  Thomas and I got a lot of funny looks when we told friends that we were each bringing our families on a trip together!

But for our family it made sense.  Everyone wanted to hang out with Little V and everyone on both sides of the family got along.  Plus, our two families have some additional connections independent of us - Liz & Dave live in the same town as Thomas's cousin Beau and his wife Jessica, and they already hang out together.  And Thomas and I just wanted to make sure we had LOTS of babysitters on call while we were on vacation.

So, we were off to our favorite Big Island resort, the Mauna Lani, and I'm happy to report that the trip was a grand success.  With a group as large as ours, we let everyone plan their own activities and only got together as a full group for dinners a few times during the week.  That turned out to be a good call.  Virginia loved all the attention from so many family members and spent the week swimming in the ocean and pool, digging in the sand, doing puzzles, eating chicken nuggets, and napping and sleeping hard after such busy days.

Thomas and I took advantage of all our babysitters (if you are reading this, thanks!!!!) to do a few activities of our own.  Early in the week, we went on a Blue Hawaiian helicopter ride with Uncle Steven.  We saw a little lava from the volcano as well as some gorgeous coastal waterfalls.  We also brushed up on our SCUBA skills and went for a night dive with manta rays!  And we certainly enjoyed our share of mai tais (a few members of our group were mai tai casualties during the week, but I won't name names).

We have so many great photos from the trip that I'm going to have to spread them over a few posts.  Here are some of the better ones from one of our first nights at the bar with our group: