So long, farewell, aloha and goodbye

I suspect this will be my last blog post from Hawaii. (At least THIS time around - knock on wood).

It's a little bittersweet. We do look forward to going back to the east coast, but we will miss the friends and cherish the memories we've created here in Hawaii.

Let me backtrack a moment to share a couple of pictures from this week.

Tuesday, we went to our neighbor, Big M's promotion ceremony at the COMPACFLT Boat House. It was a really nicely done ceremony, and we were honored to sit right up front as if we were family.

Blunoz Family in the COMPACFLT Boat House

As I mentioned before, we went to our Cub Scout Pack field day / olympics on Saturday morning, and ES received his patch for completing the Historic Honolulu Hike.

(There is another historic hike you can do over on the Big Island to get another rocker that fills in the gap next to the Honolulu rocker.)

Then we went to the Hawaiian Waters Adventure Park with our awesome neighbors and friends, Big M, B, J & M. One of the water park employees took this picture.

Me and ES on the Waianai Coaster

It's not the best quality picture, especially with all the water washed out in the foreground. Still, I thought it was a pretty cool action shot with us up at an angle on the wall. (You can go to my previous post about the water park to see pics and videos of us going down the slides).

Tonight we had our farewell dinner with our same awesome neighbors. The kids chose the foreign residence of tasty flatbreads. Not what the adults would have chosen for our last dinner on the island, but the kids were kind of emotional and we didn't want to cause any more trauma.

M and ES were two peas in a pod as usual.

YB and J enjoy their pancakes.*
(*This photo is rather UNusual in that they're both sitting quitely and eating.)

We stopped by their house (across the street from our use-ta-house) to use their printer and print out our boarding passes. Both our boys LOVE dogs and wish they could have a dog, but my wife is allergic to dogs. The boys have both loved playing with Copper across the street.

ES giving Copper a hug goodbye.

Farewell Photo

I tried to get them to give each other a hug for the photo like they did for our last best-friends-farewell, but they wouldn't have anything of it.

We've been really blessed to have such wonderful neighbors in each of our duty stations. Each duty station, when the time has come for us to leave, we've had wonderful neighbors to lend us a hand with preparations for moving out. This was no exception. I wish we could be here to help them with their move out here in a few months, because they really bent over backwards to help us with our move. THANK YOU GUYS! I don't know how we would have made it through our movers, check-out inspection, and trip to the airport without you.

I'm not sure how much time I'll have to blog while we're on the road, but I'll try to post periodic updates en route to DC.