Hawaii....Are we there yet ........?

In Hawaii and well and truly on the way home...............this picture says a lot to me. I reckon we pretty well look like we have been on the road for a while, tired from having way too much fun, plenty of contented smiles and a bit of colour, but also I think that there is that little nervous twitch in there somewhere about going back to the real world and dealing with all the crap associated with it.

Samara is taking the pic at an arms length, Wendy is close to cracking up laughing and I'm just kickin' back relaxing (and thinking that maybe I'm missing Mexico just a little bit too much).
I remember Samara taking this shot, but don't remember exactly where that was.....but anyway, It's a cool family shot.....and after all this time (24 x 7) in each other's face, the knive's are'nt out and we are all still smiling, that's gotta say something...!

We are very close to the end of this trip's blog, but I will be back over the next week or two with a couple of final entries and a few interesting facts and figures hopefully if I can retrive them from all the data that has filled my head over the course of this journey. It has been nothing short of stunning, life changing, and totally unforgettable , seeing old friends and meeting new ones that will hopefully last as long as the old ones we have just revisited after 25 years.
I have seen and experienced things over here that I could'nt have even dreamed about, and I think I can speak for the girls also when I say that.
Now it is heads down and start working on the next adventure, and I'm pretty sure that Mexico will be part of it again.

Hawaii, North Shore.

The first photo here is taken from the steps of the house again and looking just up towards Pipeline which is pretty well right in front of the end of the lagoon you can see here. That lagoon is made from when the bigger sets of waves come in and come right up the beach and over into this low spot.....on big swells and the right tides this happens that regularly that the water does'nt get time to soak away before the next wave dumps another load into it, so it just keeps getting deeper and deeper, when this shot was taken it was just below waist deep.

The second shot is actually my last shot from this day, and shows how this day ended up. It got as black as hell........lightning strikes were going directly into the ocean and the lagoon at this stage was well over waist deep and taking up a good sized area of the beach. The couple of white spots you can see on the photo is from rain drops on my lens picking up light from my flash which went off automatically as it had got so dark. There were still a couple of guys out in the water, but I had been at the beach for over 10 hours by this stage and it was time to go back to the house and start downloading 4 CF cards full of images and see what little nuggets I had managed to capture through this day of magic surf. This day alone made it well worth the effort to get back to the North Shore on our way home to Oz......when this place is going off, it really is something to witness........the next day it had dropped right off, and the day after that it was basically flat again. All this group of surf photos in the next few posts of this blog were taken on the one day...it went from perfect waves in beautiful sunshine to wild waves and a full on storm black sky.........I got sunburnt in the morning and saturated in the afternoon, and loved every minute of it.

Hawaii, North Shore.

The first photo here is a wide angle shot looking straight out to "Off The Wall" surf break and up past the trampoline towards Log Cabins break, taken from the steps of the house I stayed in nearly two years ago.
It is my favourite place to shoot OTW from as it is elevated and right in front of the break. My big lens is still mounted on the tripod in the foreground but I have taken the camera off and mounted it on the wide angle for this photo...note the sky in the background starting to darken up.

The second shot is another photographer down on the beach just to my left who was shooting OTW and also Log Cabins........note how a wave has just come right up the beach and under his feet leaving a foam ring where it stopped and the plastic bag over his lens, and also how dark the sky is by now....it had started raining by this time and the ocean was getting progressively wilder.

In the first shot here, this guy is looking up and back at the wave he just caught, pointing at it and seemingly having a few words to it, but in the second shot which was taken a couple of minutes later he is standing on the beach looking out into the break and waiting for the front half of his board to appear after copping the same wave on the head after his little conversation with it........these waves were breaking very close to shore in shallow water for the end of the ride.

Hawaii, North Shore...... Backdoor and Off The Wall.

Another couple of shots from the same day as the previous photos....one of them a big hack and the next just a nice barrell, but by this time it had started raining and I was shooting from under a $2 plastic raincoat.

John John Florence at Off The Wall.....Hawaii

What a difference a day makes again........LAX to this in a day.......well nearly.

We flew out to Hawaii as planned on 2nd Nov and arrived in Honolulu at about 9.30am, went and picked up the rental car and booked into our hotel in Waikiki.
I left the girls there to go and cruise the shops and whatever while I hit the H1 freeway in the rental, as all I was interested in was getting up to the North Shore to see what was going on in the way of waves, and also to try and find our accomodation for the next 5 days. One hour later I was up there looking at a dead flat blue ocean and not holding a lot of hope of any sort of real wave action. BUT, this is Hawaii we are talking about here. I did what I had to do up there and headed back to Waikiki to hook up with the girls again and head out to dinner at DUKE'S on the beach ........(Thanks Chris, it was 100% beautiful and appreciated like you would'nt believe).

The next day we were back on the H1 first thing and heading across the island. About half way up to Haleiwa I hear this odd noise coming from the car and then feel a bit of a sway up happening......flat right rear tyre, (after about 13,000 kilometers on this trip, we get the first car drama in our last 300 K's of driving) and I just happen to be on the far inside lane of a freeway, so somehow I navigate my way through 3 lanes of traffic and pull over on the side of the road without loosing the car and start unloading all the luggage out of the back so I can get to the spare. I am just about to put the jack under the car whilst laying on the road, and Wendy says something which I can not quite hear, anyway I stick my head out from under the car, and there is a tow truck just reversing up to the front of the car.

About four minutes later the job is done and he is gone.........all he said was "your a traveller are'nt you" I answer him with yes, and he says "no worries, let me fix this for you" and gets his trolley jack and "rattle gun" from the back of the truck and next thing I know he was gone. Pacific Towing I think was the name on his truck....very much appreciated I will say.

Anyway, we were all back up on the North Shore by mid morning, checked into our place at Sharks Cove, and snorkelling in that flat blue ocean I was talking about before by lunch time..........still no waves !!!

The next morning I woke up at a sparrow's fart and headed straight down to Pipeline to see if anything has changed........grabbed my camera on the way out just in case and BINGO....this was what I'm greeted with. The first two shots are of John John Florence hanging onto the wall at "Off The Wall" and then pulling out before the axe comes down on him, the third shot is taken looking up towards Waimea at a break called Log Cabins, and the fourth is some lucky barrell hound getting shacked at OTW again. The North Shore of Oahu in Hawaii is legendary for going from dead flat to huge within hours, and that's basically what happened on this occasion, it's certainly not as big as it can get, but it was still a good size and pretty clean,( and thankfully so) as thats the main reason for coming here on the way home.........to get the waves when they are on.
I think the young John John in these pics is totally on fire with his surfing and will be a force to be reckoned with in the not too distant future....(Kelly Slater has said that he will know these waves better than anyone ever has) as he has been surfing them since he was about 8 years old, he is just so good at such a young age and is totally relaxed in pretty heavy conditions.
I also got some really good shots of him last time I was over here, he does'nt miss out on too many sessions as he lives here.........look for that name coming up through the ranks real soon.

LAX....1st Nov 07.

It's me again (Mal).

Oh my goodness............what a difference a day makes.
The beautiful surrounds of Mexico and the Caribbean one day and Los Angeles international airport the next.

Big thanks go out to Terri and Larry for their synchronisation and effort in getting us and our gear all up here today (our bags seem to have expanded since Mexico).......... we would be lost without you guys.

Tonight, this is the view from a decidedly crappy hotel room right on top of LAX for a quick and hopefully easy exit to Hawaii early tomorrow morning....(one thing we have learnt on this trip, is that there is generally no such thing as a quick and easy exit from LAX). This is our third passage through this airport in the last three months, and not one of them has been remotely pleasant....it's always stressfull and full on, but at the other end Hawaii is'nt, so it's all good.

As I type this the girls are in bed and there is a constant flow of jets landing and taking off to both the north and south of this motel which makes for a stereophonic sonic sleep tonight I think, but wait, there's more............................the main highway south to San Diego is at the front door, so we are surrounded by sound, and it is not quite the 'Bumberfest" type sound that I would prefer, but it is the sound that we have become quite used to over the course of this journey, "on the road type sounds". It is all part of the travelling experience though and "ya gotta love it for what it is", and thats why we are travelling is'nt it.......the joy of new experiences, new friends, and learning in life, and believe me.....this trip has delivered on all of the above for all of us.

As we drove through Poway, Pendleton and other bits of southern California today on the way to the airport, the extent of the bushfires that went through here last week while we were in Mexico became fully apparent .....something like 1,400 homes completely lost or damaged (and there are still minor fires burning around here as I write this) , it just seemed surreal that our friends here were going through this ordeal while we were down in Mexico oblivious to the fact that it was even happening, these fires came so close to where we stayed with Terri and Brent before and after Mexico while in this area.

Anyway, tomorrow I am hoping to land in Hawaii to be greeted with some sizeable "Pipeline" magic over the next 5 days or so, and we have another early start in the morning to make it all happen, (but not as early as our 3am start yesterday in Cancun to get to Dallas Texas so we could connect to San Diego and be there for all the hoohaa of halloween which the grommet absolutely had a ball in joining in with all the local kids and trick or treating) so I will sign out of here for now and get back and do some more in the next day or two.

See ya.!!!