One year ago ...

It was a year ago this past Saturday that we left for Hawaii. What a great vacation!

Hawaii panorama

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Originally uploaded by mjenkinson

If you go to the "Shared Items" list down the side of my blog, you'll notice an entry for stitching photos together in a panorama.

I went back to that one tonight and tried it, and it works exactly as advertised! I put this panorama of the skyline from the roof of our condo in Waikiki together in no time flat. I LOVE this photo.

EDIT:

Here's another one. I love this one more!

Travelling Hawaii Facebook Group

As part of my social media education, I created a Facebook page tonight called Travelling Hawaii.

Feel free to become a fan. It's mostly for experimental purposes so I can figure out how to use Facebook better, but, hey, if it takes off, great!

Sea Life Park Aquarium, Hawaii

Winter returned overnight, so it's a perfect opportunity to repost our final Hawaii video. This was taken by my older daughter at Sea Life Park Aquarium on Oahu.

You are my sunshine!

Our penultimate Hawaii video. Nicole shot this on her camera, as she didn't want to learn to play the ukulele. It was taken at the Polynesian Cultural Center.

Funny side note: this is our most-viewed Hawaii video on YouTube, and someone awarded it the dreaded one-star (Poor) rating.

Surfing in Hawaii!

It's Sunday morning, it's cold. Time for another visit to Hawaii!

This was the first Hawaii video I put together a few months ago when I started playing around with our video editing software. It's a 30-second clip edited down from about 3 minutes of footage. I thought it turned out pretty good. Make sure you stay until the end of the credits.

I love this video for several reasons:

• One of the things Nicole absolutely wanted to do in Hawaii was surfing. For her, this was a dream come true. It was a great thrill as a parent to watch her have so much fun.
• Michelle did not want to go surfing, but we cajoled her into doing it, and she was so happy afterwards. This was an enormous step for her because she was utterly intimidated by the prospect of surfing, but sucked it up, took the lessons, and had a blast.

Basically, this was a chance to watch my kids do something amazing, and stand back and take it all in. What a joy!

Oooohhh .... I love turtles

Another Hawaii video. This one I'm posting directly, as the YouTube version is way too pixelated and I'm not happy with it in that form.

This is a video of Green Sea Turtles, which was taken on the North Shore of Oahu. There was a spot where about 50 Green Sea Turtles would come every day to sun themselves and eat. This site is well known in Hawaii, but it isn't advertised very much. If you know about it, great, and if you don't, it's just an unmarked spot on a beach near the highway that you'll drive by before you even know you've missed it. I can't remember how my wife discovered its existence, but good thing she did, as we stopped here twice during our trip, and it was a fantastic experience. The kids loved it.

Interested observers were allowed to go in the water to swim and snorkel with them, as long as we didn't touch or crowd them. (The turtles were allowed to touch or crowd us, however.)

Polynesian Cultural Centre - Oahu, Hawaii

As readers of my old blog are aware, I took the family to Hawaii last year for what I called my "Sun-sponsored" vacation. (Translation: I spent some of my buyout money from the Edmonton Sun on the holiday. I actually wanted to take a picture of myself on the beach holding a sign saying, "YOU PAID FOR THIS" and sending it to then-publisher Gord Norrie, but I'm pretty sure he would not have found it amusing.)

Since then, I've put all of our Hawaii videos on YouTube. Over the next few weeks, I'll be reposting them here, because in this weather, we need all the reminder of warmth and sunshine we can possibly get.

Today's video is the canoe pageant at the Polynesian Cultural Center.