Maui in May

Last time we were in Maui was last June so we decided to go a little earlier this year. Last Thursday (5/12) we headed for the airport. 

As we boarded our plane at SeaTac, we bid adieu to Seattle's rain and cold. 

Maui greeted us with blue skies, warm temps and no rain! The kids picked us up at OGG and we headed to upcountry Maui. 

In their microclimate, the Macadamia tree starts dropping nuts in late September and continues through the winter. They saved a box for us to crack. 

The cracker works good once the operator learns the right amount of force to apply to the nut. It takes about 300 psi to crack the shell and the trick is to strike hard enough to crack the nut but not so hard as to smash the nut. 

After cracking the box full, we picked up another half box from the bounty remaining under the tree.

 In two sessions, Iko and I cracked over five pounds. As you can see there are many whole nuts but there's a good percentage of those ready to use in baked goods too. 

Saturday I walked up to the local Farmer's Market. Along the way I came across this fire hydrant that has been on Island time.

Some street art caught my eye. Near as I could tell, they were all used masks. Guess it's a comment on the times. 

My Sweetie sporting a freshly picked Plumeria flower.

Left my laptop home this time thinking that I'd post blog entries from my phone thereby saving the extra steps of transferring photos from phone to laptop. After writing most of the best post ever, somehow it disappeared into the never never land of computer gremlins. Now I'm going to break the observations up into shorter sections.