With only a week left before the arduous 16 hour flight home, we reflected on the items still left on our to-do list. Mauna Kea is still calling my name, I wanted to get my hair cut, possibly a tattoo, and finally we were hoping to visit Capt Cook’s monument and visit The Place of Refuge before boarding the tiki plane and heading back home.

While at pot luck we sat laughing , actively discussing all of the “oh, and that time when we were…” and the “did you see the look on her face when….”. We’ve just a few things left and these past few days have offered time to sit by the campfire. Every so often we’re gifted a light summer shower. I’m so used to it that I don’t even bother to get up anymore and seek out shelter. Now we just sit and laugh, enjoy the moments refreshment and get right back to enjoying the campfire. In the distance we can see the hillside burn for “Pele’s march to the Pacific”. I managed to get as close as I could before the ground started to get warm and mildly uncomfortable to walk on. Jen was to freaked out my the heat to keep going, but I would have if she weren’t such a chicken. I know my limits.

Speaking of limits, recently I was re-introduced to the Passion Flower. My Dad and his wife grow these odd and almost alien looking flowers in their yard but here they are much more abundant. Here they’ve also figured out how to extract the honey from the passion flower by soaking the flowers in regular honey. This potion was suggested to me as a sleep aid with possible dream enhancements. Now I don’t dream, so the offer of dreams came as a bit of a surprise. More of a surprise would be the resulting tie dyed colors that danced through my dreams and right into the dawn. I’ve always been a light sleeper and I tend to toss and turn; creating this ugly pattern of waking up and forcing myself to go back to sleep. This pattern combined with the honey made for dancing colors galore, both asleep and awake.

I’ve met lots of really nice but really weird people. Nobody can seem to understand why I wouldn’t want to just cancel my plane ticket and stay here. I’ve found a Robert Frost poem that summed it up nicely for me though:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.