Hawaii Vacation, Day 9!!: Tuesday, March 8th

What the kids did on Tuesday...

Playing with a balloon with Uncle Dan.

Grammy laughing at our goofy kids.

The newest thing the kids picked up while we were gone was Corban picking Malorie up. He grabs underneath her arms and she throws her legs around his waist- it's so cute!

Kettle hats!

We had to check out of our hotel at 11 a.m. Tuesday so I woke up at 7 wanting to hang out on the beach at least one more hour before showering and packing!

Jesse enjoying the ocean on Waikiki Beach:)

Surfer picture in our room.

Watching TV before we had to check out- all packed and ready to go!

View of our balcony from inside the room.

Another view from our balcony (this is the hotel I mentioned earlier that had breakfast around their pool at 6 a.m. every morning with live ukulele music:)

View of Tiki's restaurant we ate at Saturday night and the ocean!

Here's a shot of the lobby at the Waikiki Beach Marriott after we checked out.

Another lobby shot of our hotel.

After checking out, we checked our suitcases at the desk and went to the Honolulu Zoo since it was in walking distance and the shuttle to the airport wasn't picking us up from our hotel until 2:40 p.m. I guess President Obama and his family were at this zoo recently, too. I just thought it was funny when I looked at the zoo's website for admission cost and hours before we left that there were a million pictures of the Obama family on it:)

Pink flamingos.

Cool tree at the zoo.

Indian Elephants.

Turtles.

Giant crocodile!

Tortoise.

Hippopotamus sign- I was so excited to see these since I've never seen these at a zoo before and have heard that they can be pretty mean...

Unfortunately, this was the state of the hippopotamuses at noon- sleeping. I guess they're more nocturnal (as were many of the animals we saw;) Darn!

Giraffe eating hay from above.

Zebras just chilling.

Rhinoceros eating. They had the giraffes, zebras, and rhinoceroses all in the same living area so apparently, they must get along:)

They just let peacocks run free at the Honolulu Zoo and they wanted people food! This one was very interested in one little boy's pizza near us:) He hopped right up to him. I just thought it was so weird- an animal I've always thought of as so beautiful, that I thought would most likely be in a cage- roaming free and trying to eat people food.

They had a whole barn animal section with lots of hands-on educational games for kids to play that Corban and Malorie would have loved. We took this picture of the Zebus because of that silly song from Veggie Tales called "Cebu".

We left the zoo at 2 p.m. to get our suitcases and wait for our shuttle to discover that an entire street next to our hotel (the one we could see from our balcony) was closed and filled with fire trucks. They weren't letting anyone above the lobby in our hotel- the tower we had been in was on fire! We don't think it would have affected us (we read an article about it when we got home) but Jesse and I still felt like God protected us because neither we or our stuff was in our room when our tower caught fire!

We reached the Honolulu International Airport and were waiting at our gate by 3:30 p.m. Our flight left at 5 p.m. (10 p.m. our time) and it went straight from Honolulu to Chicago so it was a long flight!