North Shore - Oahu, Hawaii - Big Bear's Wife

The North Shore on the island of Oahu in Hawaii would totally be my top pick for places to live, if I could afford to live there that is. 😉 It’s beautiful and it’s not so full of tourist (well not as bad as Waikiki anyways). While we traveled all over the island during our anniversary trip, we took our actually anniversary (Feb, 3rd) and drove to the North Shore! We spent the day driving around, exploring empty picture perfect beaches, searching for sea turtles, checking out food trucks and we even watched our first pro surfing competition!

Our day was pretty gloomy and raining but we totally made the best of it. Heck, I’d rather be out in the rain of Hawaii than the rain of Virginia haha. Plus the rain made everything greener, the flowers were blooming and the waves were HUGE!

~~Our main goal~~…. ok MY main goal was to find a sea turtle. I had read all about “Turtle Beach” and had spent tons of time researching spots and ideal weather conditions. Well… our trip didn’t boast any ideal weather conditions for turtles to be out and sunning themselves on the beach but I still had high hopes.

As we were on the look for turtle beach we found this one. Turtle Beach isn’t marked so you kind of just have to know what area to look in and just scan the road/beaches (well unless you KNOW where it is), so since this was our first time on the North Shore we were just on the hunt.

But anyways, we found this beach and spent a while walking together. There was absolutely no one out there but us. It was so unlike the beaches near us on the East Coast of the mainland. Our beaches are always packed with people. I know that this day was kind of rainy but even on the other days that were sunny were didn’t run into many people on the beaches unless we were in Waikiki. Stay away from Waikiki and you’ll have almost private beaches!

After walking for a while we found a lifeguard tower and asked about Turtle Beach, they pointed us in the right direction and we made our way back to the road.

Since we were pretty close to Turtle Beach we just left our car parked where it was and walked down the road. We saw TONS of hibiscus bushes/trees and I did find this sea turtle when we were walking! haha Isn’t he cute! He was painted on the doors to someone’s driveway!

After about 10 minutes of walking we found Turtle Beach ( Laniakea Beach).

It’s pretty hidden but the “Turtle Watch” people that were there assured us that we were at the right place. There are volunteers (no I don’t remember what they’re actually called, but I think it was maybe this group: Malama Na Honu Foundation) that are there on the beach to tell people about the turtles and to keep the turtles safe.

So we sat on the rocks and we waited. There is obviously no time table for the turtles and they could care less that there are people waiting for them on the beach haha. Since it wasn’t very sunny there wasn’t really any reason for the turtles to come up on the beach as they normally come onto the beach to bask in the warm Hawaiian sun!

I sat around snapping some photos of the ocean and then after quite a bit of waiting…. a SEA TURTLE!

Do you see him there? He was just swimming and floating with the waves right at the shore line.

He wasn’t really interested in coming onto the beach but it was amazing to watch him swimming in the ocean so close to the beach.

After a while of watching the sea turtle swim and snapping 100000 and +1 photos we decided to head on over to Haleiwa to get lunch.

We stopped for lunch at Giovanni’s Shrimp Truck. Their shrimp scampi is delish and you HAVE to stop there when you go! I even wrote a whole post about their shrimp truck!

For dessert we drove over to Délice Crêpes and met Johnathan! There we tried some of the most wonderful crepes that transported me back to Paris! If you want to read about those, I wrote a blog post about them as well!

So while we were eating, Jonathan (the guy there in the van) told us about this “Little Surfing Competition” that was going on right down the road. Being that we’d never been to a surfing competition we though we’d check it out! Heck, I had heard that some of the best surfers travel to the Pipeline in Oahu’s North Shore to surf! We had to check it out!

Like normal it took us a few stops before we landed on the right beach haha. We first stopped here. Another beautiful, peaceful, ghost like beach. Not a soul in sight.

So we headed down the road a bit more and stumbled onto hoards and hoards of parked cars. This must be the place. There were TONS of people there so we had to park a bit of a ways down the road.

We walked and walked and walked to get back up to the beach where we had saw all of the cars. I kept telling BigBear that we would end up walking all the way up there and that with our luck it would be over by the time we got there haha.

We met this little guy on our travels. There are wild chickens EVERYWHERE in Hawaii haha.

And we also came across this truck as we got closer to the competition beach! Fresh fruit and fresh coconut juice straight from a coconut!

Hawaii, yep! I’m in love!

Finally we reached the 2014 Volcom Pipe Pro!

We grabbed some shave ice and headed down to hang out on the beach and watch!

These surfers were AMAZING. I’ve never seen anything like this in real life The waves were so huge and they made the surfers look so super tiny!

I wish I knew who these surfers were so that I could tag them for y’all but sadly I don’t. If any of you know who these awesome dudes are let me know! I tried to look it up on the website but I don’t want to name anyone wrong!