Big sis & I were up bright and early this morning to head to the Swamp Meet & Marketplace at Aloha Stadium. Background info – my sister loves flea markets and lives for a good bargain! She can bargain for ANYTHING – honestly it should be listed as a special talent on her resume. Therefore she was VERY excited to go to this marketplace. It was a very cool experience because I’ve never been to anything like it before. Picture this: football stadium, outside the arena rows of local merchants selling everything from fruits, jewelry, art, clothes, pastries, souvenirs, soap etc. It was awesome. We got their at around 8am and walked around the entire stadium by 11am – Doc & I are very fast decisive speed walking shoppers. We bought a ton of stuff but we will be back to visit with our Mama when she comes in 2 weeks – because she loves these kinds of places [who do you think Doc got the bargain gene from?].
I periodically kept checking my phone for updates about the Pipe Masters competition in the morning. Finally at 11am the competition status became ON! Therefore we headed out to North Shore. It was a very long drive – 1.5 hours – because apparently the speed limit on highways in Oahu is 55mph [I’m a MI girl and our speed limit is 70mph so at baseline I go 75]. Once we got to North Shore we drove up to the competition and tried to find parking – simultaneously Doc was SUPER hungry and when she’s hungry she is not a happy camper. Therefore I decided we should grab lunch first because she would not enjoy the competition if she was hungry and I wouldn’t hear the end of it.
Since North Shore is famous for shrimp carts we headed to Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck which is known to be the BEST shrimp truck in town. We ordered the Shrimp Scampi and Lemon Butter Shrimp. Grabbed our lunches and drove to a little secluded beach and had lunch by the water. The shrimp was AMAZING!! We will def be going back throughout our stay in Oahu – I want to order to The “No Refunds” Hoy & Spicy Shrimp. Once we were fueled up and Doc was out of her hypoglycemic state we headed to the competition.
I am by no means a die hard surfing fan – but it is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be able to go to the Pipe Masters competition. It was awesome! Doc’s goal was to get all the free stuff she could possibly gather – she was very successful!! The waves were unreal and intense. I’ve never seen such high waves! The competition is going on for the next 13 days – I will def be back again to watch the finals.
I’m glad we accomplished a lot and I credit that to Doc waking me up rather early!
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