The Husbster has used his fancy-pants random number generator and I have a winner for my October contest of “something cool from Hawaii.” The winner is Kym from San Jose. Expect something cool to be coming your way shortly!

And the winner of the Bonus drawing (also random number generated) is Robyn from Canada!! You too should expect a cool Hawwian prize to be arriving on your doorstep shortly.

Now, back to more pictures, just because I can.

On both Tuesday and Wednesday the Hubster and I walked about a mile to the closest sandy beach (most were lava rocks).

It was very cool. You could rend snorkling equiptment and snorkle right off the coast - maybe 10 yards off the beach it turned into reef.

There were lots of cool fishies! We saw fishies of every color, some HUGE parrotfish, another sea turtle, a puffer fish, and when I was accidentally all by myself, I saw a freaking HUGE fishy that wasn’t about to get out of the way of a snorkler.

I got scared after that and since we’d already been snorkling for more than a half hour we called it a day.

Wednesday night was the conference banquet (which was kinda lame).

There were lots of cool animals around the resort, actually. There are very few animal species native to Hawaii, and like most invasive species, the ones there are all over the place.

There were lots of lizards.

(And can someone tell me why I thought of Jill everytime I saw one of these guys?)

And Mongeese (mongooses?). He’s kind of hard to see in this picture but he’s in the sunny spot between the plant and the chair. There were actually two of them and they were fighting right next to where I was sitting. But I only got the pic of one. They move fast.

The hotel even had a dolphin lagoon! If you paid a ton of money you could swim with them (in a group and not really swim with them).