Aloha!

Thanks to my wonderful husband for making his quota for last year, he made "President's Club 2008" and since I'm the wife, I got to tag along on the bonus trip - to the big island of Hawaii at the Four Seasons Resort! We dropped Jacob off in San Francisco with my parents, which we were both happy about. It would have been too hard to bring him with us and they were able to spend a lot of time with him. We left Saturday morning to Kona, spent the afternoon walking the grounds, checking out the beach, the pools and everything else. While walking on the beach, we found some sea turtles sun bathing: Once we were in our room, we were more than impressed with the accomodations. Here's the view from our room, very pretty:
There were 4 pools, one pool for snorkeling which had thousands of tropical fish as well as sting rays, an adult only pool (where mostly the much older people hung out), a "quiet" pool where they'd walk around offering evian mists, sunglass cleaning, cold towels and sliced cucumber, you name it. At first I wasn't sure if these things cost money so I declined but after seeing others get it for free, I quickly joined in on all the freebies! The last pool was more kid friendly. At the kid pool, they would come around and serve ice cream to you and pineapple sticks. HEre's a picture of that pool:

My goodness, it was so relaxing! When we weren't doing a group scheduled activity, we seriously just lounged around. Our favorite place to lounge was on the beach chairs on the sand drinking our lava flows (yummy smoothies). We were able to snorkel two separate times. One was with a zodiac tour, which was a blast! The second was on our catamaran trip. Here's my honey snorkeling:On our way back to the dock, we were able to come across some spinner dolphins (they get their name literally from the way they spin in the air) and it was amazing to have hundreds swimming with our boat. We were in arms reach and that was a definite highlight of the trip.

This one is doing one of his spins in the air, but we had a hard time getting a good picture of that.

We couldn't swim on our beach due to all the lava rock, but they were able to block off a section of the beach with reef to allow for some playing in the water. HEre's a picture of our beach:

I think my favorite part of the trip was our group trip on a catamaran. There were about 50 of us that went and so we split into 2 groups and spent a good portion of our day on the boat and then snorkeled, saw some whales. It was just gorgeous. Wesley and I loved just hanging out on the trampoline mesh area b/c you can see right into the water below and it was the most gorgeous blue I've ever seen!

Our last evening we had a farewell dinner with hula dancers and fire dancers, which was amazing! They also gave out awards to each sales person for the work they'd done. Here is Wesley with his boss, Chad (in the middle) and the sales guy, Mike that he works together with, receiving their awards.

We were able to take a walk on our last day around the coast and it was just gorgeous!

I've always wanted to get a picture of us walking to our plane and up the stairs:

I loved how you waited outside at the terminal.

We were just so fortunate to be able to receive this trip and we had such a great time. I was really really anxious to get back to Jacob, I missed him too much. I was thrilled that he wasn't fazed by our absence and he did great. So great, in fact, that he decided to take his first steps while were gone! Stinker! He gave us a little taste again on Sunday, thankfully. When we went to get him though, he didn't want me (sob sob). He went to WEs and every time I tried to take him, he'd cling to Wesley more. WEsley loved that Jake wanted him so much! That didn't last long and by morning he was happy to see me again!