Aloha!

Hubby and I returned last night from our little island get away. We've been relaxing on the Big Island of Hawaii soaking up the warm sun. This hammock was outside on the grounds of our hotel, next to the ocean and was the prefect spot to watch the sunset.

This is our third trip to the islands but our first trip to the big island. Are timing was prefect as we missed the first big snow fall at home. My daughter was taking care of the house and Jenny (the cat) while we were away and I got a few frantic text messages with "help" where is the shovel and salt???. Fortunately the usual weather here is to have a warm spell after a snow fall and it now looks like it never snowed at all.

Paradise wasn't entirely prefect. Our plane arrived early in the morning, too early to check in to our hotel. We decided a tour of a coffee farm would be a good first day activity. That's when it started....the rain. And not just your whimpy rain drops, this was like stepping under a water fall. The rain cut the tour short and we decided the next best thing would be sit the rain out while enjoying Kona coffee and a chocolate brownie. We sat for a very very long long time, the rain doesn't seem to be letting up, the waitress came around and said the roads are starting to get washed out. Hmmm.....we better go to our hotel. About a 2 minute drive down the road, we saw a few cars stopped on the road in front of us and then we saw it, just like the movies, mud and rocks raging across the road, unbelievable what do we do now? A couple of cars turned around but where would they go?? Soon they discovered more mud and rocks across the road in the other direction as well. And then a pipe next to the road broke and water was shooting up in the sky about 30 feet right behind us. So to make a long story short, we stayed in the car watching raging mud, down pouring rain and water shooting up from the ground for about 2 hours before it let up and the road could finally be cleared. I can't tell you how worried I was that our first night on the island was going to be sleeping in a car. The next day there was almost no signs of all the rocks and mud....incredible experience. The rest of the trip was dry, sunny and stress free....whew.

I have so many things to show you, the packages waiting for me when I got home and the antique shop find I brought home from the island. This was going to be a short post that turned long quickly. I feel like I've missed so much and have so much catching up to do in blogland. I'll be around shortly to read what everyone has been up to this last week.