In the first week of February 2008 I went to Hawaii with my family. We went to Kauai. I took a ton of pics and videos, which I had always planned to share on StrangeCandy. But YouTube has been a bitch and I haven’t been able to load the videos…until now. So now i’m starting to share the story of my vacation along with the pictures and video…some are really fun. It’ll take a few installments.

Carla, my sister, came down to stay with me the night before we flew out to Kauai. I, of course, had work late and hadn’t even started packing until I got home from work. I knew I wasn’t going to get any sleep, so i wasn’t about to let Carla get any sleep. So i put on some Kathy Griffin and got to it.

Here I am, obviously very excited.

After a six hour flight we finally got to Kauai. It was muggy and raining lightly. We didn’t start to panic yet, because we knew it rained in Hawaii all the time, on every island. And we had even checked the weather and we knew it would be raining a little more than usual.

We were staying at Hanalei Bay Resort, it was super nice and we could see mountains and waterfalls out the back doors. There were pretty birds and all that. The grounds were just beautiful.

Apparently Kauai is, literally, the wettest place on the planet. This island gets, like, 600 inches of rain a year!!! And, unknown to me and my sister, we were vacationing on this wet wet island right in the middle of its rainy season. Mom and her partner, Benitta, knew this and chose not to tell us.

We realized this fact the second day we were in the condo when there was torrential downfall rain. It was crazy. It was the day of the Superbowl and Benitta and I went with her niece, Belia, and her husband, Doug, who live on Maui and were staying with us for a few days, to find a bar to watch the Superbowl. A few minutes after leaving the grounds we got a call from my Mom saying the rain actually FLOODED our condo and then the power went out. So we had to actually switch condos. It was crazy. When we got back, almost the entire condo had water all over the floor.

This is my Mom, she was very excited when we finally got settled into our second condo.

RAIN. Here’s a sample. The part where we’re in the car is when we were searching for the bar.

There is only so much rain we could take, so me and my sister were looking for something to make it fun. She came up with the great idea of the EXPERIMENT: to find out if we could slide down a wet, muddy hill in plastic garbage bags. This is actually her second attempt. She erased the first video i had because she thought it was just a bad picture of her…we had words about that.

This is Belia and Doug, you’ll see more them in future posts…

One thing about this island is there are roosters EVERYWHERE.

Finally, sun starved on the third day, we drove to the south, “sunny,” side of the island for some beach time.

Driving back to the north side, we stopped by Waimea Canyon, the grand canyon of Hawaii. It was beautiful.

And we got some ice cream. Apparently the place is famous. I don’t know about all that but the ice cream was hella good.

That night me and Carla couldn’t sleep, so we had a photo shoot. It was super duper HOT:

STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF HAWAII 2008: ZIPLINING!!!!! I’ve got tons of video of that….