Happy Birthday America!!



Waimea rainout

We had an ambitious day planned for our first 4th of July here on the Big Island! I usually avoid things like that because I truly hate dealing with crowds. We wanted to go to the rodeo up in Waimea, en head down to Waikaloa for the Rubber Duckie Races and see Ippy, the Big Island's hope for the new Food Network Star, emcee a cook-off, check out a craft fair and then head not Kona for the evening parade!
Well, we decided to stay at our condo in town the night before to get a 25 mile head start and woke up to beautiful sunshine. After our SPAM, fruit and toast we headed up to Waimea only to run into rain at the rodeo and we both agreed that was not how we wanted to start our day so off we headed to Waikoloa. The good news about the rainout was we got to Waikola and managed to get a great parking space, free goodie bags with duckies in them, adopted our duckies for the race (hope to find out the winners soon), see some entertainment and watch the food cook-off.


John and Ippy

Me waiting for parade

Our prize!

While the judges were deciding Ippy was asking trivia contests for prizes and when he said the next prize was a horseback ride for two John said he was getting it! Well, Ippy started saying, " when you are in a restaurant and have escargot..." up shot John's hand! Ippy looked surprised since he hadn't finished the question and thought John would guess wrong out of the blue since we had no idea where the question was going, BUT, John said "SNAILS" and lucky us, that was the answer to the question he would have asked!! So you can look forward to a future blog about horsebacks riding for sure! After have we took the shuttle to the Hilton for the craft fair and we got a new TIKI, for my newest collection I'm starting.... Back to watch the duck race and now we are in Kona town waiting for the parade at 5:30. They are having fireworks at 8:00, but we aren't sure we'll last that long.... We didn't.... Went home! The parade was almost 2 hours long and so a fun small town parade with everything from the Boy Scouts to the Governor of Hawaii. Happy Birthday America!