One Week Later...

This morning I was driving across town with John; he had an appointment with the oral surgeon to remove 4 impacted wisdom teeth (yipes). He's recovering fine and is humgry! I was commenting to him that exactly a week ago we were on our way back from Hawaii sitting in the airport at Phoenix. It's taken me a good two days plus after we got back to unpack and do laundry, get the house somewhat caught up, download the over 1,000 images that I took, cull through them and upload them to the Walgreen's Photo Center for printing. I am not done with that part yet! To make matters worse, I've taken MORE photos on Thursday, Friday and Sunday! But, I DO love the new Nikon I got for graduation...

Posted here are some images from Hawaii; it's hard to choose what to post. From the top we've got a wild orchid growing in the yard of the house we stayed at in Volcano Village. The next one of the little tree on the moss is like a natural Bonsai tree; we call it the Octopus tree and it gets pretty tall (but not in this case). It was on the rainforest trail onthe way down to the crater on the Big Island. Then there is the ginger flower stalk (many different kinds of ginger in case you didn't know). The next one is of the red 'I'iwi birds that live in the rainforest. My brother and I were treated to a rare glimpse of four to five birds feeding and flitting aroun the ginger plants. Usually you'll see one and they are hard to view as the fly around in the forest canopy just out of your visual range. We've never seen this many at one time in full display. There are two birds that are pretty visible in this shot.

To give you a sense of scale of the crater that we hiked through, you can see my brother and the rest of the party in the foreground. Really immense crater. The shrub with the red flowers is the Ohia Lehua.

Then we jump over to the coastline of Moloka'i; those are crab holes there on the beach! My son loves chasing after them at low tide (in the mud; we've all done that growing up on the island).

The beautiful beach is on the west end of Moloka'i; we call it the Maki Horse beach (it really has a different Hawaiian name). Maki means, 'dead' in Hawaiian and a long time ago someone found a dead horse on the beach and then that became the reference name for that beach.

The last image is the southeast shoreline of Moloka'i. If you look really hard, you can see the wharf jutting out on the very top part of the image. Maui looms in the back where the clouds are.

It's a long journey to and fro, but I'll be doing it again next year since we have a family reunion happening on Moloka'i.