Polo, and not the Marco type

We took in a polo match on the North Shore yesterday and took the new camera on a test drive. Neither of us had ever been to a polo match before; it was definitely interesting. Apparently it is an entirely different social experience more akin to going to the Kentucky Derby in places other than Hawaii, but here it was just as relaxed as everything else. That would include the announcer. He was so bad it was hilarious. He said the game was four chukkers long when it was actually five and compared the Chilean players to Mexican food. After the match between the Hawaii team and the Maui team, some people from Skydive Hawaii parachuted right onto the polo field. All in all in interesting but relaxed Sunday on the North Shore.

--jeff & jess

Post Number 100!!!

Welcome to the One Hundredth Jess and Jeff... Blog post!

We got our new camera today. It's very similar to our old camera, but this one hasn't been through the wash (yet). We'll get out and start taking more pics, but it's currently charging. Wait for it...

This morning, after Jeff finished ship duty, we went down to Haunama Bay for some snorkeling. The current is changing, so we didn't feel like swimming past the break to get to where the mass of coral reef lies, although there is some along the way. The more interesting sea life lives further out though. None of the pics we ever take of the Bay turn out really well, sorry!

-jess and jeff

Orders

I don't think we've mentioned yet that I received orders to my next command. I will finish my tour aboard USS PAUL HAMILTON in December, and will begin working at the Office of Naval Intelligence in January. In the meanwhile, we've got several busy months ahead as we look at all the things we need to accomplish and all the fun we need to have in Hawaii.

-Jeff

Ohiki-lolo

We adventured to a Waianae beach today called Ohiki-lolo, which is Hawaiian for either "prying your brains out" or "crazy sand crab." We saw some hermit crabs, but they seemed perfectly sane to us. The beach was completely deserted, as you can see from the pictures, and the water was super warm and calm because it was separated from the ocean by a barrier of volcano rock. So we had our nice little bathtub-temperature private beach for a few hours today; it was definitely worth the drive!

(We took these pictures with Jess's old camera, by the way - it still does a very nice job, but the batteries die quickly)

Speaking of, we took the Camry, and we're finally going to post a picture of it where we parked to "hike" down to the beach. It might look familiar to some of you.

--jess and jeff

Labor Day Weekend

Labor Day was a while back, but we're slack and these are the most recent pictures we have. We were able to fix the camera electronically, but the LCD is out of commission, so we're doing a mandatory upgrade. Look for pictures from the new camera soon!

We had a really great Labor Day weekend. We started out with an impromptu visit to the Dole Plantation for the best pineapple juice imaginable. It's worth the trip just to spend a couple bucks for a glass of juice, but we also had some tourists take a (bad) picture of us in a pineapple thing before doing the pineapple maze without the map. We did it in about an hour; the ticket lady told us the quickest time on the maze was seven minutes. That was pretty hard to imagine.

Saturday we hiked to Kaena Point in the morning. We picked a gorgeous day to do it! We had decided to take advantage of the small surf on the North Shore while it lasts by snorkeling Shark's Cove afterward. Randy and Kris met us from Honolulu, and Jeff's old boss met us up there with some of Jeff's other coworkers. Afterward we had fantastic pizza at Pizza Bob's.

We've gotten a little more boring since then because we're starting to organize ourselves for another 6,000 mile move - decluttering, figuring out where we're going and how we're getting there, what to sell and what to keep, and all of that fun stuff. But we did get up to Haleiwa to have the famous Matsumoto shave ice. The verdict that it was fantastic, but the best North Shore treat is definitely the pineapple juice!

-jess and jeff

Jeff's a genius

For those of you who didn't hear, Jeff and I had a tragic load of laundry this weekend that included the camera, my cell phone, and my wallet, which happened to be purple so it dyed some of the clothes. But due to Jeff being the awesome genius that he is, my phone was saved and he's still working on the camera (which worked electronically, but there was water behind the lens so the view was messed up). I tested my phone by emailing myself the cute picture (left) I'd recently taken of Zeke. For those of you who were wondering how on earth he got a phone that was completely submerged in warm soapy water to work again, the answer is taking the battery out ASAP, taking the phone apart as much as you can and burying it in kitty litter (the crystal kind) to dry it out.

-jess

New old car!

In case you were wondering how on earth Jeff and I were managing to get him to work and me to school, we bought an old island beater last weekend. It's a light blue 1989 Toyota Camry with these fabulously ghetto rims that make it easy to spot amongst all the other old island-beater Toyotas on campus. The first day I tried to drive it into school, it didn't start. I imagine we probably could have gotten pretty annoyed by the fact that we'd just bought this vehicle and it didn't work, but I was able to bum a ride to campus with a neighbor, Jeff was able to pick me up, and after we replaced the battery, the car was just fine. Just a minor inconvenience. It doesn't have AC or a CD player or anything remotely fancy about it, but it goes, and at least now it doesn't smell strange.

--jess

Midweek Trip to Kauai

It's been over a week since we went to Kauai, and we really haven't had a chance to stop and write about what we've done. We flew into Lihue on Tuesday afternoon, checked into our quiet little country inn, and then went for a wander on the beach and dinner at a Mexican restaurant; I still think I was spoiled by the fantastic Mexican food in San Diego to the point that most anything else is sub-par, however Jessica had a fantastic chicken mole.

Our primary focus of the trip was to get to the fabled tunnel hike to the North Shore, which is a mile long hike through a tunnel that was constructed in the 1920s to divert water to grow sugar. We made it through about half a mile of mud and muck before getting we made it the stream pictured to the upper left. The trail was supposed to continue after you crossed the stream and moved shortly upstream a little, but we were unsuccessful in finding the continuation of the trail and so continued hiking up the stream for well over an hour before heading back down and calling the hike. We spent the remainder of the day on the Kauai North Shore at the beach.
Day three was spent exploring the Waimea Canyon and other West Side locals. This place is astounding, and really gives an impression of how big and fantastic Hawaii is. We stopped at multiple scenic overlooks, but after our long stream hike the day before avoided any of the trails, regardless of difficulty. Our final stop before returning to Lihue was Shipwreck beach, which is a deceiving name, because there definitely isn't a shipwreck on the beach that we saw. We did get this cute shot of Jessica (all the pictures of me were squinty and bad and showed my crazy sunburn (which looked as if Jess had punched me in the eye)). We flew back to Oahu that evening; it's really nice to be back after even such a short trip. I think we could imagine living on Kauai, despite all the chickens, based on how nice and easy the lifestyle is. The one thing we missed out on during our trip was Ziplining, which we'll need to go back for.


As always, additional photos are posted to Photobucket.

-Jeff and Jess