The last few days

And it came much more quickly than I anticipated!  The last few days. How quickly the end of almost 6 years living in one place comes. Seems like one will never see the end of grad school, and then suddenly, its over. And suddenly time to move on. Christy and I leave in less than a week.  Today was my last Sunday at my church, and I did not make it out without tears. Every goodbye is hard. And I still have quite a few more goodbye's to say. It could be a long week.

But, I'm pretty close to being packed. My family came this weekend to help me out and we made some good progress, but I will still have more work to do this week!

Also, I finally had a bit of time to put together some of the family vacation pics from Kauai, so I thought I should share those too!

Here's the best part  - the Kauai coffee plantation!!!! We got to walk among some coffee plants and sample all the coffee blends.  Heaven! Oh and by the way. It was good coffee. :)

Here's some pics  - coffee plants, the coffee plant berries (the beans are inside) and some coffee plant flowers. They are very small but really really fragrant! (and the tiny cup I'm holding is the coffee sample cup - one of our sets of tour guides told us to go and bring our own mugs!)

Kauai was really beautiful. We went up a few times to the east side of the island to Waimea Canyon State Park and Koke'e State Park. Here you can see the Waimea River and the Canyon. Beautiful!

We drove to the Kalalau lookout and then hiked the Awa'awa'puhi trail so that we could see some Napali coast scenery.  There aren't a lot of roads that get you close to the Napali coast as it is pretty rugged, people do a lot of helicopter tours or boat tours to see it. So we did a 3.25 mile hike (1 way) with a pretty good drop in elevation from the beginning to the end lookout to see it. And then climbed back out. I keep seeing different numbers, but the difference in elevation was somewhere around 1500ft. Like I said in a previous post, I needed to get in shape for vacation!  But the water is so blue and beautiful and it was worth it!

 

And then we tried surfing lessons at Hanalei on the north coast of Kauai. The top pic shows the beautiful scenery this beach! mountains! can't beat that. 

The lessons consisted of us (and another lady) learning how to stand up and balance on our boards. (In the sand.) And then we followed our instructor out in the water and would wait for our turn, where he would wait for a good wave, let us go, and then we would put that standing into practice to surf our wave. (well, that's the way it was supposed to work anyway).

What I learned about surfing:  you are supposed to look at the shore while you stand up. If you don't, you will watch the front of your board go under water, then you will fly off your board and get crashed by the wave you were trying to surf. Kinda crazy to know you are in about waist deep water and you can't find the top. (See the picture of the blue board and a portion of someones head for demonstration - that's how I spent most of my lesson). So surfing wasn't my forte, but it was fun, although quite exhausting. :)

We also learned that in our family the saying is true, the old guy does rule! My dad made it up and caught the wave all the way to the shore (see the bottom right pic!)