Aspen Meadow and Pinecrest

With the one big event for this summer being Hawaii, I knew we'd have plenty of days at home this season.  I love a restful summer and am certainly not complaining, but I also knew I needed a strategy to keep us from getting too stir crazy.  So, all the weeks of summer have at least one fun family outing marked on them.  Things we've done and have coming up include amusement and water parks, VBS, a baseball game, and an overnight in the city.  This past week the outing was a quick camping trip to our favorite mountain lake oasis, Pinecrest!  

We tried something new this year and kicked off our camping days with a trail ride through Aspen Meadow and the Immigrant Wilderness.  This was amazing!  The kids loved being on horses for a longer ride and the views were breathtaking.  You know we continue to try and convince our kids that hiking is awesome.  We are successful in this attempt only some of the time.  This experience gave us all the views and peace of plodding along through forests full of deer and fields full of wildflowers, but had the horses doing all the work.  A big WIN for Delia! :) 

After horseback riding, we made our way over to Pinecrest to set up camp.   This year we all enjoyed Dave's Father's Day present at our campsite-- a tree hammock.  Actually, we girls may have even monopolized it a bit!  Really, a good book you are sharing with your kids, cooler temps, a view of trees, the smell of the fire, and a slight breeze to keep you swaying, what more could one need?!  We were definitely happy campers!

After pitching the tent and making lunch, we took a short hike to our geocache spot to do the annual maintenance.  It's always fun to read the comments from those who have found it!

Ella perfected her marshmallow roasting skills.

And we spent plenty of time at the lake!  We took advantage of the twilight boat rental hours and shared a kayak for 2 hours.  We played some cards and built some sand castles.

We bobbed around on rafts and read in the sand.

And we took "Eat ice cream for lunch" off the Summer Bucket List!  Pinecrest is our happy place, indeed.

Fourth Festivities

I don't even know how many years we've been doing this, but the tradition of sharing Independence Day with Phil, Jetta and their kids lived on this summer!  Swimming, BBQ, kid-decorated berry flag cakes, goofy fun while waiting for night to fall, and a show of fireworks were the ways we once again celebrated the USA's birthday.  Special this year was the addition of some new friends!  We loved having Tim and Donna and their kids join the fun!

(I was told the flag cakes were "abstract" this year!)

Another Culinary Adventure Courtesy of Dorina

Everything from homemade Italian delights, like pizelle cookies and tiramisu, to that crazy "ace bandage bread" you use to sop up Ethopian food, my culinary world is bigger thanks mostly to one person: my college roomie Dorina.  Coming from a much more ethnically diverse background than I did, Dorina started introducing this picky, plain Dutch girl to foods from around the world 20 years ago!  On our recent visit to see her and her daughters, the food was once again exotic and new to us!  Dorina took us to a cute little town, full of bookshops and adorable boutiques.  We ate lunch at a French bakery and then had the most interesting dessert-- gourmet rolled ice cream!  "What is this?" you wonder.  It's pretty much made completely from scratch ice cream, mixed and frozen right in front of you!  Dessert and a show!  Check out the video...

After the freshly frozen cream is spread out in a thin layer on the super cold marble slab, a large spatula is used to roll the ice cream up into these petals.  Isn't is so pretty?

We loved our day of boutique shopping, book store browsing, and fancy ice cream feasting!  But that was not all Dorina had on the menu.  At home she cooked up an amazing Indian-style dinner of Butter Chicken, cauliflower, Jasmine rice, and Naan.  While she whipped this up, our kids cooked up a fun talent show featuring gymnastics, dancing, singing and comedy.  Dorina has been feeding me for 20 years; our girls have been putting on shows together for 12. :)

A trip down south to spend time with Dorina and her family is always a treat, and never complete with out a silly selfie!  Full of good conversation, laughter, and delicious food, we always leave feeling thankful for this life long friendship and the close proximity the Lord placed us in!

Honolua and Lahaina

One last Hawaii post sharing just a few lingering thoughts and pictures!  These were a few random outings we made to various parts of the island...

One afternoon was spent snorkeling in Honolua Bay. There are a few thing to notice from the picture above.  One, the clarity of the water!  Two, the abundance of coral reef! And three, all the boat cruises that charge you the big bucks to visit this top snorkel spot in Maui.  We enjoyed it all for free!  Here we added to our collection of tropical fish sighted and grew in our appreciation for how vast, diverse and beautiful that underwater world actually is!

Another afternoon we visited the supposedly #1 Shave Ice place in all of Maui.  To be fair judges, we felt it necessary to visit at least one other place for the sake of comparison. :)

And since we were in Hawaii on Father's Day, we thought it would be nice to treat Dave to a more upscale meal than those from the resort's deli and tiki snack bar that we'd been eating all week!  We went to a fancy ocean front restaurant in Lahaina where both he and Ella enjoyed some local seafood and we all enjoyed the view.

I think it's always a little hard when so much anticipation and expectation goes into a grand trip like this one.  The girls have been telling us for almost a decade now that Hawaii is their dream vacation, and asking when they'd get a turn to go.   We waited until they were old enough to appreciate and remember it.  Till they were independent enough to do things like sleep in the hotel while Dave and I went on our own snorkel date, or walk themselves back to the hotel room from the beach when they did things like forget their books. (It's SO great, friends of young ones!  LOVE this older, more mature stage of our kids!!)  But still, that worry-- would this trip be as good as our last one?  Would the kids love it as much as we all hoped they would?  The answers were YES and YES!  Our kids told us many many times how grateful they were and how this is their new favorite place ever.  It's left us with that same ticklish thought we had last time, this was supposed to be another "trip of a lifetime", but how can we not go back?!  There is so much more to be discovered on islands like O'ahu, Kaua'i, and the Big Island.  So, I guess I'll end this series of vacation posts with the words engraved on our resort's exit sign: "A hui hou kakou"; Until we meet again Hawaii...

Drums of the Pacific Luau

We gave them lots of options: snorkeling cruise, aquarium trip, pineapple tour, boogie board or SUP rental, surf lessons, etc.  But, the one thing the girls were in total agreement on and had on their own Hawaii Must Do list was to visit a luau.  Though this is expensive, we thought it was the kind of thing you can't travel all the way to Hawaii and NOT experience, so we found a "kids go for free" deal and booked some tickets. 

Everything about this ended up being awesome for the girls!  They loved the people in costume, the leis, the tropical punch and Shirley Temple drinks that kept appearing at our table, the roasted pig, the delicious dinner, the fashion show, the buffet of desserts and...

getting to actually go on stage and learn how to hula! They dragged me up there with them and it was pretty fun (it's how I got the above picture, Dave's pics and videos are from the audience perspective).  We learned the Hu Ke Lau, which brought back great memories from Dorina's weddings!

The girls, Delia especially, were totally wowed at the program too-- the colors, the stories told through dance, the FIRE DANCERS!  Ella and Delia were the very picture of enthusiasm while taking it all in.

Afterwards they wanted some pictures with the performers and made the cutest small talk with them!  Delia proudly told the hula girl above that she is a dancer too and promised the hula man (is that what you call them?) below that she would NOT play with fire.

This experience is one I'm certain they'll remember.  And lifelong memories are my favorite thing to invest money in! :)

Nakalele

On our third day we did another short hike with the girls in the morning.  We revisited a favorite trek from last time's trip: what the locals call "Acid War Zone to Blowhole".

This gave us yet another totally new Maui landscape to explore.  On this piece of North Shore land, the wind and salt water has eroded the black cliffs to look like something from a science fiction movie.  It's the kind of hike that has lots of rock climbing, so the kids were actually fans of it.  While you hike there is that magnificent, all-colors-of-blue sea to look at and a few interestingly shaped rocks-- like the heart above!

The destination is this crazy phenomenon-- the Nakalele Blowhole, which is a geyser that can spout water up to 100 feet in the air!  Unfortunately, we may have oversold it a bit to our kids because we went during a low tide, so all the giant hole was doing was bubbling water, definitely not shooting it a hundred feet in the air!

But, to see another new part of Maui and to spend a morning climbing around on what felt like a Star Wars set was still pretty cool!

The Road to Hana

Now Maui is spectacular.  Don't let me lead you to believe that we spent the entire week laying by the pool looking at nothing but our books!  We did two days of hiking, which the girls were pretty good sports about.  The first day was an all-day drive down the twisty Road to Hana, where we popped out of the car every few miles to take in some of the following sensational scenes:

Rainbow Eucalyptus groves!  How beautiful are these trees?!

More waterfalls than we could count!  I guess the current season is an especially wet one.  It was raining on this day and all the falls were running at full speed.  This made them pretty to see, but all came with a "Do Not Swim" warning because their pools were muddy and turbulent and flash floods were a possibility.

Black sand beaches!  Made of tiny pieces of ground up volcanic rock, the black making a sharp contrast to the white foam of the ocean waves, this is landscape like no other!

Dark sea caves!

And a 4 mile hike through a half a dozen other beautiful landscapes-- like the jungle waterfall above, or the crazy, many-trunked Banyan Tree below.

Our hike also took us through a bamboo forest that was so cool!  It was dark inside and full of the sound of the tall bamboo trunks clanking together.  Since the poles are hollow, they were lightweight and fun to pick up, even when they were at least 10 feet tall!  Again, the rainy season meant LOTS of mud to trudge through and lots of humidity and mosquitoes!  We were definitely not in the Central Valley anymore!

The end of our hike was the jaw dropping 400 foot Waimuku Falls.

As we made the long and winding road back home, we broke it up by pulling over a few more times to take in a few more views of waterfalls and dramatic coastline.

This drive is really something.  The Road to Hana supposedly has 600 turns and did take us a full 12 hours to enjoy. But despite the tired kids in the backseat, the mosquitoes, the unexpected "Don't Get Too Close to Any Waterfall" Warnings and the mud sloshed all over our legs after hiking, for the scenery it offers alone, it's a Maui Must!