Susan & Rachelle

Waimea Canyon, Kaua’i

Koke’e Park Lookout in Waimea Canyon, Kaua’i (we were there a few days before!)

Pilot Donald Torres

Beautiful Kaua’i

John & Allison

Ke’e Beach, Kaua’i (we were there the day before!)

Coming down

I don’t know why I took so many photos on our helicopter tour with Inter-Island Helicopters, because I could have taken 3,000 photos and still not captured the beauty and magnificence of the trip. This was definitely the thing that I was the most nervous and excited for on the trip. It was a great experience, of course it was tinged by two helicopters crashing only days later, one of them being the helicopter we flew in, piloted by our same pilot. If you want to read more on that, see this earlier post (related posts where my photos were used on Hawaii news broadcasts here and here). Like I said there, I thought our pilot was great and informative and fun and safe. It’s too bad that the close proximity of the crashes tainted our ride. .. like not the experience itself, but how I feel about ever doing it again or recommending it to others.

I wasn’t going a good job editing out photos I didn’t like, I like them all… so see all of my photos here. Also, here are Allison’s short video clips taken during our flight – video 1, video 2.

One other thing, Puka Dog. John had become obsessed with trying a Puka Dog, which is a Hawaiian style hotdog. I’ll get into it more in a few posts, but on this day “Puka! Puka! Puka!” was kind of a mantra for us… whenever we were getting freaked out by the Helicopter or anything else we chanted it or said something about “Live for the Puka!” At one point during our helicopter tour John pressed the button to speak and asked Donald, our pilot, if he liked Puka Dog. Donald didn’t understand what he said and all the rest of us were just giggling. Donald was like “what? what?” so I pressed my button and said “He wanted to know if you like Puka Dog!” Donald sort of just rolled his eyes and said they were over rated. I think John started crying. Now what did we have to live for!? Kidding!

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