Settling In

We've been in Thailand three days now and our routine is beginning to be established. This year we are back in a studio room rather than a one-bedroom apartment. The place we stay, Smith Suites, has become so popular that a number of ex-pats are staying here year-round and all the larger units are rented. We are on the third floor, so our view isn't nearly as good as it was from the sixth. But there is lots of storage space and the kitchen is well-equipped. The electric hob has two burners instead of the four we had last year, but we never use more than one anyway. I do miss a more comfortable place to sit and lounge. It is either the bed or a chair at the small table.

The first night we went back to a nearby place we like, the Blues Pub. I had my usual chicken with cashews, stir-fried with lots of veggies. Always delicious. It's nice to be recognized and welcomed back.

Not far from us was a new building going up last year. It is finally open, a hotel called just Bed. It is pretty expensive for here (around $75 a night) and looks really nice. The parking lot for five or so cars is right off the street.

This year we are doing less restaurant eating and more take-out. Friday we had chicken wraps from a vendor we've used frequently before. They are delicious. Tonight (Saturday) Dan went to a nearby market and brought back several delicious things. The first were five veggie wraps for salad. There were two dipping sauces. There is a small piece of meat in with the carrots, cucumbers and nice lettuce.

He got a bag of noodles. I'm not sure what the flavor was, but they were tasty. We also had barbecued chicken, about five pieces. All of this cost about $3.

I had my first massage today. I was happy to be back with Dang, who knows my body quite well and does a good job. She could tell it had been too long since my last massage! I haven't done a lot more yet, as I am still recovering from walking pneumonia. It is getting better every day; I still don't have a very high energy level.

Goodbye Hawaii, Hello Thailand

On our last day (January 1) in our rental house, we did laundry and packed up our things for the trip. The first place we went was a waterfall north of Hilo. It was beautiful from a distance. The path was fairly long and of varying altitudes, so I passed on it. (I am better, but still quite short of breath.)

As we left the waterfall park, we saw a local bakery in a small town. It was open (it seemed most places were closed on New Year's Day.) We stopped in and had some early lunch treats. Their baked goods were outstanding. Dan finally had a Hawaiian spam sandwich, sort of like sushi wrapped with rice and seaweed. Spam is very popular in Hawaii; it is on many menus.

On the way back into Hilo, we took a side road designated "scenic route." It certainly was. It went by the Botanical Gardens, which Anjali, Dirk and Tracy were planning to visit on Tuesday.

We also drove to some beach parks in town. One had an interesting kind of moat pool around a tree.

We sat in the shade for a while and watched people swimming and snorkeling. We talked with one woman after she got out and she said the water was quite cold.

We planned to eat a very early supper at a pancake house, one of the few places open on the holiday. Everyone enjoyed our meal, and a few even had pancakes! When we were finished, we headed for the airport, where Domingos, Dan and I checked in for our flight to Honolulu. Domingos was heading home to work. Dan and I stayed in a hotel near the airport before our late morning flight to Thailand.

We flew Korean Air, as we have the past few years, as it flies from Seoul directly to Chiang Mai. We like not having to change planes in Bangkok. We got in about 11:00 and had a fairly quick run through immigration and customs. We didn't have to wait for a taxi, and we were in our room by midnight. Today (Thursday) we are buy getting set up -- Dan renting a scooter, changing money, both of us doing some grocery shopping. We'll be settled by evening.

New Year's Eve

On Sunday we had a quieter day, staying in our area in the southern part of the island. After a light lunch at home, Tracy went for a run toward a nearby beach. The rest of us drove there and dropped Dirk off. Then we drove along the coast road until it ended. We were a bit surprised at the number of residences in the area, as it is quite near the lava flow. We stopped at a number of spots along the way; the scenery was breath-taking everywhere.

This marker remembering someone was at one of the beaches.

This area was a more recent lava flow, as you can see, the vegetation is much younger.

At the end of the road there were several cafes and a parking lot. A sign said the black sand beach was a quarter of a mile away, so we walked on the path. This painting was obviously done by native Hawaiians. We saw several signs wishing they could have their islands back.

Here is Anjali at the black sand beach. There was definitely sand but the beach itself was pretty rocky.

On our way back, we picked up Dirk and Tracy. After some more downtime at the house, we went for an early dinner at Kaleo's, a wonderful restaurant in nearby Pahoa.

My coconut-crusted ono fish with liliko'i sauce was fabulous. (Liliko'i is passion fruit.)

Dan had Korean short ribs, which he thoroughly enjoyed.

None of us stayed up to see in the New Year, but the others all heard some very loud firecrackers at midnight. I never heard a thing!

This evening we fly to Honolulu and tomorrow on to Thailand.

2017 Reads

At the end of the year, I like to look back on the books I've read throughout the year and remember some of the best ones. According to the list I keep, I read 79 books in the past 12 months. I'm going to share some of my favorites.  [These are all fiction, even if they don't sound like it!]

R.F. Delderfield - To Serve Them All My Days. Another long English story, about a World War I veteran who ends up teaching in a small private school in Devon. (Last year I read God Is an Englishman, by the same author.)

M.M. Kaye - The Far Pavilions. A reread of one of my favorite novels set in India. A young English boy's parents both die; his ayah saves him and raises him as her own in a Himalayan kingdom. At age 11 they flee the kingdom, she dies, and he turns himself in to a British outpost. Years later, he is returned to India as a soldier.

Mackenzie Ford - Gifts of War. This story really stayed with me -- another World War I story. This one has a British officer who meets up with a German officer on Christmas Day. The German gives him a photo of his English girlfriend and asks him to find her after the war. The suspense of what and when he will tell her the truth is well-done.

Jacqueline Winspear - In This Grave Hour. Maisie Dobbs becomes involved with an evacuee child. I can't recommend this series highly enough.

Alexander McCall Smith - The Bertie Project. Everyone's favorite Scottish child and his neighbors have further adventures. One of the most delightful series out there.

Beatrice Colin - To Capture What We Cannot Keep. Scottish siblings and their chaperone go to Paris, become involved in the Eiffel Tower construction.

Carrie Fisher - The Princess Diarist. Carrie's untimely death took a good actress and an excellent writer from us.

Lucinda Riley - The Shadow Sister. The third book in this wonderful series focuses on Star, the sister who seemed the most dependent on the others.

Lindsay Jayne Ashford - The Woman on the Orient Express. A fictionalized Agatha Christie travels to Baghdad on the historic train and her life becomes entwined with two others.

Jojo Moyes - The Horse Dancer. A somewhat compiicated story about a teenage girl and her horse, her grandfather, and a young lawyer and her ex who become involved.

Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch. I wanted to read this book for several years, but its size was a bit daunting. Once I started, however, I couldn't put it down. A young boy is caught in a blast in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and gets away with a small painting, which has a lifelong effect on him.

Jennifer Ryan - The Chilbury Ladies' Choir. World War II village women form a choir; their lives are told through journals and letters.

Sarah Domet - The Guineveres.  Four girls with the same name are left at a convent in World War II. They fall in love with soldiers in comas, serve as altar girls, one becomes pregnant.

Fredrick Backman - Beartown. A small town's hockey team is the focus of everyone's lives; a rape disturbs the peace. This doesn't sound like a story I would like, but Backman's writing holds my interest every time.

Emma Donaghue - The Wonder. An English nurse is sent to Ireland with a priest to observe a young girl who is fasting. Is it a miracle?

Jessica Shattuck - The Women in the Castle. Widows of Nazi resistors and their children survive.

Anna Hope - Wake. The lives of three English women in the aftermath of World War I; their lives come together around the burial of the unknown warrior.

Alexander McCall Smith - A Distant View of Everything. Another in the Isabel Dalhousie series; this time she gets involved with a man who is suspected of fleecing women.

Melodie Winawer - The Scribe of Siena. A time travel romance of a modern woman who goes to medieval Siena and falls in love with an artist. This especially appealed to me because we were in Siena for a day a couple of years ago.

Helen Bryan - War Brides. Five women spend World War II in a village, return 50 years later to solve a mystery of what happened.

Penny Vincenzi - The Best of Times. The aftermath of a large wreck on the A4 heading into London and the effect it had on several lives.

Richard Russo - Elsewhere. [nonfiction] The author's memoir of his mother's OCD and his enabling her.

Rebecca Hunt - Mr. Chartwell. A librarian is fighting depression, which appears as a very large black dog who invades her home. She finds out the he visits Churchill, too. An odd book but gripping.

Petra Durst-Benning - While the World Is Still Asleep. Young women in 1890's Germany become obsessed with bicycling, which women are not allowed to do.

Alexander McCall Smith - The House of Unexpected Sisters. Precious discovers a sister she never knew existed.

Camille Aubrey - Cooking for Picasso. A young Frenchwoman makes lunch for Picasso and ends up posing for him.

Gail Honeyman - Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. A young woman suffers and recovers from a horrific childhood.

Lucinda Riley - The Angel Tree. A woman with amnesia for 30 years gradually recovers her memories.

Taylor Jenkins Reid - The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. An old movie star tells her life story to a young journalist. There is a mystery that remains unsolved until the very end.

Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol. After seeing the recent movie, The Man Who Invented Christmas, I decided to reread this short novella. It does stand up!

Jamie Ford - Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. In 1942 a Chinese boy in Seattle befriends a Japanese girl. Her family is interned and 44 years later he finds relics and searches for her.

Luz Gabas - Palm Trees in the Snow. This Spanish book chronicles the men from the Pyrenees who went to Fernando Po (now part of Equitorial Guinea) to work on the cacao plantations from the 1930s to the 1960s. A modern linguist is the catalyst for learning the family secrets.

Saturday in Hilo

On Saturday we toured the Hilo Coffee Mill. It is run by three women with eight employees. They have 24 acres of coffee trees and do everything by hand. On Saturdays they sponsor a small farmer's market with produce, baked goods and a few other handmade things.

Here is Jeanette showing us one of the two roasters.

They have quite a few free-range chickens, kept primarily to eat the insects. This was a handsome rooster.

Coffee berries are red and you can see some here on the tree. They ripen at different rates, so there are green and red ones at the same time. After the tour they gave samples of various flavors and types of coffee, but since I am a tea drinker, I didn't participate.

After the tour, we went to downtown Hilo, where we met our nephew Andrew and his wife Angela at the Pesto Cafe for lunch. We hadn't seen them for four years (and longer for Dirk and Tracy) and had a great time catching up. After lunch we spent some time visiting at their lovely home on a hill above the town.

As we left, we stopped at a place called the Boiling Pots on the Wailuku River. It was a lovely series of falls, pools and rapids. Although there were signs warning of the danger of going down to the water, we saw several groups of people climbing around down below.

Not far away was the Rainbow Falls on the same river. It was stunningly beautiful.

Here are the eight of us at the Boiling Pots. What a great visit!

The Birthday

The starting point of this trip to Hawaii was a celebration for Tracy's 50th birthday. And what better way to celebrate than a helicopter ride over the volcanoes. The experience was dazzling!

As we took off, the shadow of the helicopter was very clear on the ground. We saw our shadow frequently throughout the ride, as the sun was out most of the time.

Soon after leaving the airport, we flew over large macadamia farms. The fields of trees are surrounded by tall firs to break the trade winds and protect the nut trees. (We saw a similar thing in New Zealand on the kiwi farms.)

We flew down to the coast, not too far from where we had driven the day before. The blue of the water is striking against the cliffs.

Our pilot flew back and forth across the dark lava looking for a breakout. The spots change daily, even hourly, so he never knows for sure where one might be. We really lucked out, finding this small crater with three flows of lava. We could actually see it move. He circled the crater in both directions so everyone could see well.

Some distance away we could see Mauna Kea poking above the clouds. There are a number of international telescopes at the summit.

After leaving the lava fields, we flew over an area with multiple waterfalls. Beautiful!

Here is Dan, just off the helicopter. We had life vests in a small pack around our waists. Fortunately, we didn't need them!

We had a lunch reservation at the Hilo Bay Cafe, but got there quite early. Some walked around the nearby Japanese garden; I found a bench (slightly wet!) and watched the bay and the people.

The restaurant was fabulous. Here is the birthday girl enjoying her drink.

After lunch we stopped for a bit of shopping and eventually headed home. What a great day!

Volcanoes National Park

On Thursday we drove to the Volcanoes National Park and along the Chain of Craters Road. The scenery was stunning. The visitors' center was jam-packed with tourists, as was the parking lot for the lava tubes. We thought we'd do the tubes on the way back, but there were even more cars and people waiting, so we passed it up. Dan and I had gone through them on our 2008 trip here.

Unfortunately, I was not feeling well all day so I don't have many pictures. I got out of the car to see the views about half the time. By the end of the day, my medical family helped out (thanks to Tracy and Andrew) and we stopped at a pharmacy to get me some more meds. The hope is I'll feel much better very soon.

Steam rising from one of the craters

Looking into another crater

We stopped for lunch at a camping area with picnic tables (we had gotten sandwiches at a cafe on the way into the park). It was pleasant, not too hot. I was thrilled to see some nene nearby. The nene is a Hawaiian goose. It can't fly and is endangered. There were signs all along the road warning us not to run over any. This couple had a young gosling with them, a good sign.

As we came to the end of the road, we had a great view of the ocean. The sky was overcast in a way that made it impossible to see where the water ended and the sky began.

The road descended to sea level, where we were able to see several arches the water has carved into the lava cliffs.

Trees

If you are a long-time reader of my blog, you know that I like observing trees in different settings. I enjoy the various shapes. I've already seen a lot of wonderful ones here. A few are in the town of Hilo, others at the beach or during the drive.

First Hawaii Day

Tuesday evening we settled into our rental home for the week. It is a beautiful house in a residential area south of Hilo. The lots are very large; we can barely see the house next door, where the owners live. We have three bedrooms and a large living area/kitchen. There is also a nice big lanai with plenty of seating space and awnings for shade. We went into town for dinner at a Thai restaurant and headed to bed quite early, as everyone was somewhat jet-lagged. 

For breakfast on Wednesday we had bagels that Anjali had gotten. And fruit! Fresh fruit from the trees on the property -- papaya, oranges, bananas. Later in the day one of the owners brought me some pomelos (similar to grapefruit). I spent nearly a half hour peeling and removing the membranes, but it was worth it. (We like having them in Thailand, where we buy them already peeled and sectioned.)

In the morning we drove to a nearby state park, Lava Tree Park. It had a circular path so we could see the incredible vegetation and stumps of lava trees -- lava shapes that took over the trees when it flowed. One area was fenced off because of a deep rift (below).

Here is Dirk in front of some of the lava trees.

From the park, we drove to two beaches. The lava beaches are amazing but treacherous. As we approached, I got this great shot of Anjali taking a picture with Dirk taking one nearer to the beach.

Here's one of the beaches. The second one had a pool fed by hot springs with a small opening to the ocean. It looked like a great places for families. Maybe we'll get back and I can swim there.

In the afternoon, the other four left for a hike into the lava fields. Dan and I didn't go, so we had a nice quiet afternoon and evening loafing around the house.

I must have one shot of the ubiquitous gecko.

Leaving Winter Behind

It took more than 24 hours, but we did manage to leave winter behind for a while. On Sunday morning the 24th we left home to drive to Michigan City, where we leave our car and catch a bus to O'Hare. The weather report said snow would be starting about the time we were planning to get on the bus, and indeed it was snowing by the time we got there and parked. The 8:20 bus was cancelled; there were several others waiting and a load of people were brought from South Bend. We did catch the 9:20 bus and the driver was excellent. It snowed all the way to the airport. Our flight was delayed, but not by much. When we got to Seattle it was nearly 6:00 PM, dark and snowy. They don't get much snow in Seattle, but they did have a white Christmas this year. We had planned to spend the evening visiting with a friend, but after talking with her we realized none of us were going to out on the slippery roads. The restaurant attached to our hotel was closed, so we tromped through the snow (in our sandals!) to the next hotel on the street and had a nice dinner.

In the morning the hotel shuttle took us to the airport. Our flight was delayed (no surprise). It took a good hour to deice the wings, which were covered with about an inch of snow. We flew to Maui and had about 20 minutes to transfer to our plane to Hilo. We were really glad that our luggage made the transfer, too!

We took a taxi to our hotel, the Wild Ginger Inn and Hostel. It was a bit funky, but served well. There were no restaurants or groceries open (after all, it was Christmas afternoon). The very kind woman at the front desk offered us a plate of leftovers from the Christmas lunch they had served. She showed up at our room with two enormous plates of ham, beef stew, and a Filipino noodle dish.

Tuesday morning we had a nice continental breakfast then waited around until Anjali and Domingos arrived. They had spent two nights on the Kailua-Kona side of the island, then came to Hilo and picked up our rental minivan. We went to lunch at a good fish and chips place, then went to the Pacific Tsunami Museum. We learned a lot about tsunamis, and why Hilo is particularly vulnerable to them.

Quilt on the museum wall

After a stop at a coffee shop, we went to the airport to pick up Dirk and Tracy. Our rental house is in the countryside near Pahoa, about 45 minutes south of Hilo. It is beautiful, three bedrooms and a lovely large lanai. Below is the sunrise this morning, taken from our bedroom.