I Love You, California!

This weekend is our last full weekend together until the weekend of Christmas (how do we get so busy?!) so we had to go out and get our tree ASAP! Also, they're predicting a Christmas Tree shortage on the island, so we didn't want to miss out. We went down the hill to our neighborhood City Mill and loved the first one we saw! We strapped it on to the Jetta and brought it back home. It rained all day long so I just pretended that it was snow : ) Now it really does feel like Christmas! Rory has been loving the Christmas decorations!

You can probably infer from the lack of posts lately, with the exception of work related events, that October and November has been a lot of work and not so much play. We did get to Lanikai one day, but it was chilly and rained so we didn't stay too long. So we were so excited to have our good friends Joe and Paola and their adorable kids come visit for Thanksgiving! They spent the last week on Maui before coming to O`ahu today. They stopped off at their hotel then headed over for Thanksgiving dinner. We enjoyed a wonderful feast together. On Friday we took them to the North Shore to see Will's orchard and visit Waimea Valley and swim in the waterfall. We had a nice dinner at the Moana Surfrider and enjoyed watching the sunset. We even caught the tail end of the Waikiki Holiday parade!

This morning Will filmed another T.V. show! This time it was "O`ahu County News with Senator Gil Riviere." He spoke about TerViva's role in alternative energy here in Hawai`i. We'll get the link to the show in about a month! Way to go Will!

It was Demo week for the Elemental Excelerator, which is the company that provided TerViva with a large grant for their work in Hawai`i. Will is always invited to be a part of the week and during one of the sessions he spoke a bit about his work. Crushin' it like usual.

Most people do the drive to Hana in one day, which is about six hours of driving depending on how often you stop along the way to enjoy the beauty. We were so pleased with our decision to do it in two days so we didn't have to rush. (It also meant we were one of the only cars going in our direction most of the day so we didn't have to get stuck behind anyone.) When we woke up in the morning we got to enjoy sunrise from our cottage and have a relaxing cup of coffee on the lanai. Our cottage was across the street from the access point to Venus Pool which even though it is Kapu (private/forbidden) the owner of our cottage told us was ok for us to visit. We thought a dip in the waterfall pool would be a great start to the day so we went on our first adventure of the day. Unfortunately after cutting our way through the brush and fighting off mosquitoes, we found that the pool was all dried up. So back we went to the cottage to shower up and continue our advent...