Camping!

I finally have the time to blog about our highlight of the summer-- a wonderful, spur of the moment camping trip!!! I found a place to camp at 10:00 am on Friday July 10th. I quickly got everything I thought we needed and we arrived at 3:00. The place was awesome. It is a botanical garden at the base of Kaneohe's steep plant-covered cliffs. The place is called "Ho'omaluhia" and means "place of peace". It was appropriately named, too. Hopefully the pictures give some sort of an idea how lush and peaceful it was there. This was our view from our tent. There is something very telling about that stop sign in the picture....

Hardly anyone was there (despite the garden workers' assurity that the place was packed --were we in the same campground?). Although this is the rainy part of the island, it only rained when we had finished dinner and it was time to get in the tent anyway, and during the night, but stopped right before we got out.

Here we are collecting firewood. Elysse was a happy to help her daddy.

After making a rush trip to the grocery store before we were locked in for the night, we settled down to a cookout of hotdogs and marshmallows. Of course.

The next morning there was free catch-and-release fishing. Ivy was the fisherwoman of the day, catching 5 fish against our 0. Well, not true. I caught one, but I felt so bad catching it that I quickly got the hook out and released it to its freedom. I felt more guilt than accomplishment.

Kezia took the situation personally and sat a ways off sulking yet confident that she'll catch a fish at this special spot....

It didn't help that once Kezia gave up and left, Ivy went over there and caught another fish!

Elysse just said "forget it" to the whole "sit and wait" idea and tried stabbing the fish instead. Any sign that her daddy is a spear fisherman?

On the way back from fishing we found a grove of banyan trees that the girls swang on. Actually, I was hoping it would cheer Kezia up from her miserable defeat to her little sister. It worked.

Then we got bombarded by dozens of hungry ducks eager to taste our left over fish bait.

We had such a great time, we were just regretful that we didn't make the plans necessary to stay longer. It's an appropriate time to blog about this because we were hoping to return this long weekend. But we're at home instead because we would have been #71 on the wait list. Hmm, no thanks.