Maui Week 2

Here were the highlights of our 2nd week in Maui:
*Upgraded to Ocean Front 2 Bedroom
*Lei Making
*M & M Dude & Mr. President seeing an 80 year old turtle up close while snorkeling; he even looked them right in the eye and then swam back down to the bottom of the ocean! And they even saw a huge puffer fish and some type of fish with vampire teeth that we cannot find a picture in any ocean books (maybe it's a new species?).
*Maui Ocean Center- loved the turtles. Some interesting facts about turtles:
1. Wait until they are 25 to have babies
2. Their shells actually tan. If they don't have any exposure to sun, their shells turn white.
3. They are carnivores at first and then become vegetarians
*Dinner at sunset at Kimos (best ono ever with coconut panko crust and spicy peanut Thai sauce and pineapple salsa & can't leave without sharing Hula Pie)
*Searching for sea glass

Maui Vacation Week 1

Since I've got one kid home sick today, I thought I should start getting caught up on my blog.
We have a timeshare in Maui and we go every other year. It's a place where it feels like home and can't wait to come back to!

Here are some highlights of our 1st week:
*Found our new favorite restaurant, DA KITCHEN with the best Teriyaki Chicken and Potato Mac Salad!
*Mr. President's quote when we landed, "Boy, I really love the smell of Maui!"
*Scoring 4 FREE ticket to the Maui Ocean Center because the Marine Naturalist was a No Show at the resort.
*Playing Bingo and winning lots of stuff (bottles of pineapple wine, free kid activities and shaved ice)
*The kids collecting plumeria flowers
*Whale Watching~ incredible!!! Saw lots of activity despite being late in the season! One whale slapped his tail 7 times in a row.
*Swimming or snorkeling at the pool and beach every day
*Watching the beautiful and very different sunsets every night
*Exotic Flower Tour- absolutely amazing and educational tour
*Luau- great food and drinks; the fun, dark walk along the beach walk back to our resort
*Visit to the Grand Wailea
*Playing with the crabs on the beach (the crabs would run for any tree nuts we would throw at them). It was too funny;))
*BBQing at the resort

Concannon Winery Tour

Towards the end of April, M&M Dude and I went on a personal winery tour with M & M Dude's cousin and husband. I've written about Debbie and TC before as we spend a lot of time with them and even though we are relatives, they are more like friends to us! They had won a special tour of the winery for 4 and we were honored that they invited us to spend the day with them. The tour was on the historic Concannon Winery in the Livermore valley. Our tour guide was very informative. Besides tasting wine, my favorite part of the tour was learning about the wine barrels specific tree types used and why many wine growers used to use rose bushes at the end of each of grape vine row (because the rose bushes would tell the wine growers that there might be disease in the particular row and they now just plant the rose bushes as a tradition because there are other ways to determine how the grade vines are doing.) We had a great time without the kids to just relax and chat and have some wine and had an early Mexican dinner. A wonderful day!

Mini Reunion

In April, we had a mini girl's high school reunion. Many of us had not seen each other in over 20+ years, but it felt like old times! We had fun catching up, eating awesome food and wine, and reminiscing over old times.



Posts coming soon: wine tasting and vacation in Maui

A little behind... Fieldtrip to the POND!

Okay, I'm so so behind on posting. I'm very sorry! I'm going to try to catch up within the next week.
In April, I went with Firecracker's class to the "POND" in Livermore. We had a really good time with a little hike, lunch and an education on bugs by the park rangers. The kids each got a little bug net to find bugs in the pond. They found all kinds of things like frogs, mosquito larve, a dead bee, tadpoles, a couple of little fish.