If at first you don't succeed, photoshop

Yesterday, I decided to drive to the north side of the island. I first went to the Grotto where a nice Japanese lady insisted on taking my picture for me. It was very sweet, but pretty comical as well because of the communication barrier. She kept smiling and showing me "thumbs up" which I assumed meant, "Good, stay there." In actuality, she was trying to get ME to do the thumbs up. So, finally, after a few seconds of confusion, she had to come over and physically pry my hands into position. What's even funnier is that the camera was set to record. So now I have a short little video of me standing/smiling awkwardly for entirely too long, but my thumbs were up!

After that, I hit the trail near suicide cliff, and on my way home I stopped at the Mariana's Resort and Spa to say hi to the horsies. Normally, our camera takes decent outdoor shots, but these turned out terrible for some reason. Thank goodness for Photoshop!

Before

After

Sarah & Lisa's Visit

I have to confess, I am a little burnt out on the blogging (my job probably doesn't help) so I'm going to cheat a little on this one and, rather than upload an obnoxious amount of pictures to the blog, I'm just going to give you this link to our Picasa Album. By the way, I should give credit to Sarah for all of the pictures...I had to steal them from her after our beloved camera suffered an unfortunate death shortly after their arrival.

I will say, however, that it was fun to have Sarah & Lisa here. We did all of the typical touristy stuff - Banzai, Suicide, Bird Island, Forbidden, Grotto, Hidden Beach, King Fisher, American Memorial, etc. We did do a couple of things that we didn't do with previous guests though. We got to climb into a scary, dark cave with human skeleton remains. Sarah and Lisa camped out on Managaha one night. And, they were fortunate enough to help me chaperone the Youth/Single Adult "Prance" which, by the way, the youth absolutely love those girls and are trying desperately to get them to move out here.

Thanks for coming Sarah & Lisa. I hope you enjoyed it!

New Hobby

The water here is unlike anything I've ever seen! It's warm and crystal clear. All sorts of bright and exotic fish swim right beside you, and the underwater caves and coral are breathtaking.