2/18 A Small Adventure

For some reason we had trouble getting on line with Navigator and had to switch to Safari and the type on the blog is HUGE! - so sorry about that. I tried to put on some extra pix to make up for the not getting any on yesterday. The first picture is of Spouting Horn, then Scharlie, a fifth grader in my group holding a

ginger that she had dug up. The next pic is of a "moss dinosaur" that I spotted on the Alakai swamp trail. You also can see the boardwalk that we walked on (and I fell on). The next picture is one of Dave standing near a huge Banyan tree on the grounds of the Plantation Cottages. The last one is of my group from Cornell taken on the day we dug ginger in the forest. And now for the news. We woke to a beautiful day. After breakfast, we spent some time packing up (Smidgie and Alastair to their car and Dave and I back over to the main building). We also cleaned the cottage so that the new people coming in this evening would have a clean space to live. We said goodbye to the Macphails who are going to stay tonight in Lihue and then will fly over to Oahu to visit their daughter for 10 days before flying home. We then changed into shorts and went down to Plantation Cottages to post our blogs. Unfortunately, we were short of battery power so we didn’t get to put any pictures on the blog, but we will try to make up for it this weekend. We did, however, bump into the Macphails who were there checking their email. After we all finished with the computers, we decided to stay for lunch at the Plantation. We said goodbye again and then went to the Post Office to drop off some mail. We then took a leisurely drive down a nearby coast road. The temps were perfect – 85 and sunny. We discovered a lovely beach community and then stopped at a place called Spouting Horn. It was a blowhole in lava rock on the oceanfront. Apparently, it used to shoot up 200 feet, but the manager of a cane production company in the 30’s was upset that the salt spray was ruining about 10 acres of the sugar cane so he had some of his crew throw some dynamite down the hole. Now it only shoots up about 20 feet – still pretty neat though. We were going to go a little further, but it was 4:00 and we were about an hour away from the camp. We started up the mountain and, not unexpectedly, it began raining about 2 miles up the road. We went through some fairly heavy rain and quite a bit of run off on the road, but fortunately it was just sprinkling when we got to camp. We were the only ones here so we decided to do laundry while the machine was free and then ate dinner before the students got back. There are 15 students, 2 professors, and 2 children of one of the professors. Actually the students just got back (8:30) and they had eaten dinner on the shore. We will chat a bit with them and then head for bed after everyone has rotated through the bathroom. I’m not sure what we will do tomorrow, but we will definitely go down to the shore to enjoy the sun and shore.