Prepare for spelling mistakes...

Hi all,
So, a few things have actually happened over the last few days worth talking about. Firstly, I'd just like to tell everyone how insanely easy the American system is currently being for me. I've had 4 midterms and one short essay. I've had three of the midterms back and have got A, A, A- though I'm getting the last back today and am not expecting such a good mark. I just don't get it, I haven't received any A's since GCSE's! Not that I'm complaining mind you, how people fail these same courses baffles me. In Logic, I think I may be one of the smartest people in the class, other people actually ask me questions rather then the teacher. It makes no sence.
Anyway! On to actually interesting stuff. We were swimming on Friday down at Waikiki beach and we saw some people near us looking down into the sea and pointing. When we looked there, we saw a huge turtle! He was swimming around, and appeared to be surfing a few waves then swam off. It was AMAZING! I've never seen a large turtle in the wild before with my own eyes, never mind one swimming only 10 feet away from me. It's made me really want to go up to Turtle Bay where the turtles come up onto the beach. It also proves that I wasn't mad when I thought that a week or two ago I saw a dark green/brown thing come out of the water and go back under. At the time I thought that it looked like the nose of a crocodile or something but now I realise that it was obviously a turtle. If only I had realised at the time and gone to see it rather then running away!
Saturday night we went over to Elyza's and Will's again. We had a really nice night, Elyza gave Francesca all her old clothes that don't fit her any more, because Francesca clearly doesn't have enough clothes of her own... Will, like me, is a bit of a nerd, which is great. We ended up playing video games for most of the night, and Francesca and Elyza joined in and thoroughly destroyed me at the games we played. I think that Francesca is actually secretly a gamer...
Yesterday, Sunday, we jumped on a bus to take us to Makupu'u Lighthouse Trail a short walk on the east shore that goes around a hill to a small lighthouse at the other side. When we got on the bus I checked with the driver that the bus went there and he told me it did. You can see the car park for the walk from a distance away so when I did I requested the next stop. The bus driver pulled up a little way passed the beginning to the walk at an observation area. He said that there wasn't actually a bus stop where he'd stopped and that to get the bus back we'd have to walk down a hill to the sea life centre and get the bus back from there. This wasn't great news but we figured we'd deal with the problem after we'd done the walk. From this observation area we had a great view of the east shore and Waimanalo beach and could see for miles and miles and miles. We then set on to the walk and it began with a fairly steep incline, and continued with a fairly steep incline but it's not that surprising when you consider we were climbing a hill. However, there was no shade on the walk and the sun was beating down on us. Francesca turned instantly red and remained that colour for a long long time. After about half an hour we made it to the top and the view was stunning. We could even see the outline of Maui across the sea. We stayed there for about five minutes and headed back. We started thinking about what we'd do about getting the bus back and thought that we'd actually head back to the bus stop we'd last passed before the bus stopped at the observation area rather then continue to the sea life centre as I thought that we could cut across through a load of land that appeared from the hill to have paths going through it. However, when we finally got to the bottom of the hill and walked a little way along one of the paths, it turned out that the other paths I'd thought I'd seen were actually just different kinds of bushes and we couldn't walk across it. So, the only other option seemed to be to go back up to the observation area and continue to the sealife centre. All this time we're getting knackered. We'd been out in the sun for about probably an hour and a half and although we had water we were pretty much through it and once we'd climbed back up to the observation area we looked at the road we'd have to walk down to get the the sea life centre and realised that we really didn't want to as there was no space for pedestrians. The road had on one side a cliff face and on the other a small wall and then a cliff straight down to lots of rocks. We resolved that the only way we could get down to the sealife centre was to get a lift from someone at the observation post. We sat down for the first time since we'd gotten off the bus and scanned for prospective lift givers. Unfortunately we could tell that most of the groups would will up their cars. We saw two guys walking over to a 4 seat car so ran over and explained our situation but their car was full in the back, our next prey hopefully proved more bountiful. We saw two more guys and once again explained our situation and took pity on us, THANK GOD! The ride took all of 2 minutes but we were very grateful. We were slightly scared that we'd never get to the bus stop but thank god for friendly Americans. I've never hitchhicked before and intend to avoid it for the rest of my life but doing so saved our necks. Ultimately I think that the bus driver should have warned us when we got on that there wasn't a bus stop there rather then dropping us off there, which at the time seemed like a nice thing for him to do.
So, that's it for this blog entry. Sorry the story took so long! Hope no one fell asleep while reading it and I hope you like the pictures.
Tom