Day 49– Aug 17, 2005, Wednesday: Tour of Mac farm; Cleanin’ House

We started the day with eggs and bacon and Costco muffins. It is such a joy to cook our own food and more of a joy to eat it. After breakfast our local host, Jim, stopped by and said that he wanted to take me and Rodney up to his macadamia nut farm (shown at left) so we could scout out the place where we have an option to camp this Saturday night. So we headed off into the wild blue yonder while the ladies and kids stayed to start cleaning our house.

We had a great time cruising around. Jim drove us through all sorts of tiny backroads leading to mac nut orchards. We stopped in one spot and hiked down to Kamehameha Pond. It’s an awesome little waterfall with a pool by the bottom. There are actually petroglyphs on the walls around the pool. It was pretty cool. We plan to take the rest of the team there for sure this week. The rest of our trip was just 4 wheelin’ through the trees, stopping to look at mac trees every now and then.

On our return, the ladies were hard at work cleaning the house. They had all of the walls scrubbed in one of the main rooms. Rod and I got to scrub down the ceilings. I tried to explain to them that generally it’s a better idea to clean from top to bottom but they just handed me a mop. We cleaned until lunch. The kids played. It is a huge blessing that we are combined with the Richards family (thankyou God). Their girls help entertain our kids a LOT. Also, yesterday Jess and Jonny found a Barbie car (one of the electric ones that kids can drive) underneath the house. We plugged that baby in, hoping for a full charge today. Let’s just say they drove it all over this yard and it’s already needing another charge.

After lunch we had a quick nap. The kids were beat, so they crashed. Then a nice guy from the church who had a 14 passenger van came and brought us all to a beach. It was a pretty poor excuse for a beach (no sand, just dirt), but it was beautiful. Up here on the north tip of the island the waves are much bigger and the ocean is choppy like crazy. I guess the tradewinds hit more up here. The beach was basically dirt, with a little protected lagoonish area where we could get wet. No sand at all. But it was nice. We met some locals there who, as it turns out, work for Jim (our mac nut farmer host). So we played there for a few hours.

On our return, we quickly finished cleaning ceilings and then had an awesome dinner of spaghetti with garlic toast, finished off by chocolate icecream. Hmmmm. Then we all hung out and had some time of praising God. We had fun, the kids led us in a few worship songs. We sang quite a few songs actually. Then afterward we looked up verses in the bible that talk about praising God, and actually did what the verses said. “Shout to the Lord”, “Kneel before the Lord”. We didn’t do too well at the shouting part, we need to work on that one. Now, we sleep…