Thanksgiving Weekend

Thanksgiving was quite a challenge this year. The morning started with a pretty strong bought of homesickness for both of us. Thankfully we didn’t have to spend the day alone. Rich and Elizabeth invited us over for a late Thanksgiving lunch! We pulled some recipes to fix, we were supposed to prepare sauteed apples, honey glazed carrots, sweet potatoes, pureed squash and a chocolate and pumpkin pie. We got off easy seeing as Rich and Elizabeth wanted to tackle the turkey and stuffing and a few other sides. As usual (for me) what started out as well planned cooking turned into one big mess! John took on the sweet potatoes (his favorite) and he cut and prepared the apples and carrots.

I worked on the pies from scratch.

The pumpkin pie turned out tasting great but as John so graciously put it, it looked like I literally butchered the pie. I kept having to check if it was finished inside so I kept poking it and by the time it was finally done there were knife marks all over it! For some reason it ended up taking almost an hour longer to bake than the recipe said… So onto the chocolate pie.. Who knows what went wrong there! It just never set. So after all of that I didn’t have time to let the squash bake for an hour at 400. Luckily all of John’s dishes turned out great! So we left without the squash or the chocolate pie :( Turned out fine because we had so much food it was hardly missed. Better luck next year I hope!

The rest of our weekend was spent exploring the island.

We went to the Bishop museum on Saturday morning with Rich and Elizabeth and then to have lunch at a fresh fish market. We learned a lot about the history of Hawaii and the native people. We have been so spoiled with the amazing seafood here!

Later in the afternoon we went on a waterfall hike and found a trail we can’t wait to share with our friends when they come visit!

On Sunday we hiked Koko Head Crater (which reminded me a lot of climbing the Great Wall, the steps were very uneven and it was a very steep climb)

What we actually hiked was up the train tracks for the supply car from WWII. So we were walking on the rails and the cross- ties to get to the top. It was challenging, but well worth it when we reached the top!

We also hiked the crater that surrounds Hanauma bay. That’s the bay on the left side of the picture, we hiked from the middle of it all the way around to where the waves were crashing on the far side.

Koko Head Crater is the tallest peak in this picture.

I’m really looking forward to our next hiking trip. We’ll be getting a new charger for the Nikon in this week, so we’ll finally get to take real pictures of everything.. until then the phone pictures will have to do.