Day 15 - Swimming with Turtles

With our planned day of doing sod all going out of the window yesterday, it was time to take advantage of the resorts facilities. We cleared out of the room and left the bags in storage for the day. Presumably because so many flights leave late, the resort also offers hospitality rooms for you to clean up before your flight - so we booked one for 5.30pm.

With all that sorted, it was time to mop up a couple of things and then hit the beach. We jumped in the Mustang and headed a couple of miles down the road to take a few photos of the tikis at the Polynesian Centre. On the way back, we decided to pull into eat at Giovannis Shrimp Truck.

The North Shore is dotted with shrimp trucks, serving jumbo sized prawns so fresh you can hear them asking each other "hang on, where has the ocean gone?" Giovannis is the most famous of these, their stock meal is twelve prawns and two scoops of rice for twelve dollars. Normally you would take the standard garlic option but to be honest, you could smell the garlic from several feet away. With a long flight that evening, if we had had the garlic prawns I would have understood it if the flight crew had asked us to move somewhere else to avoid offending the other passengers. Like outside the plane. So we settled for the very nice and much more socially responsible lemon and butter option.

Back at Turtle Bay, we pulled the beach towels out of the boot and settled down on the sand, I put on the shades and closed my eyes then.... "Turtle! Mike! There is a turtle!"

Two of them in fact, lazily swimming a few feet from the shorefront. Every so often one would poke its head above the water but between them they seemed completely oblivious to the humans happilly taking photos a couple of feet away. It seems kind of odd that they would be here in the middle of all this human activity, but I suppose that because people seem to instinctively keep a respectful distance, the turtles don't get frightened away.

It wasn't quite as warm as in Waikiki, the cloud cover keeping the temperatures down to the high 70s or so and as thoughts turned to getting a drink and cleaned up, it even managed to rain slightly. All that did was hasten our move to the bar as we sat with a pair of fruit smoothies to die for before making use of the hospitality room to shower and change.

A final farewell meal at the beach bar to say goodbye to Turtle Bay and then the issue of loading up the Mustang with our bags. Thankfully, it seemed a little easier than the outward journey, presumably squishing four three-quarters full bags was easier than handling three full ones, plus chucking hand luggage into any available nook or cranny.

Although I preferred the Explorer on the Big Island, the Mustang left an impression on me. Mainly because we caught the courtesy shuttle to the terminal and I still had the keys in my pocket.

Into the slowest check-in line in history - I swear there must have been 20 people ahead of us, yet it still took over an hour. Still, it killed a bit of time for the 23.15 departure time. A Boeing 767 this time, flying to Auckland and thankfully on Air New Zealand once more. We even managed to bag an exit row which meant lots and lots of lovely legroom for the nine hour flight.