On our way home from Honolulu yesterday, which happened to be our Preparation Day, we noticed that the surf was coming in quite strongly on the northwest beaches. We finally found a place to stop and park for a few minutes. The beaches at Sunset, Waimea, and Hale’iwa were all roped off for swimmers as the surf was just too dangerous. On the other hand, scores of die-hard surfers were out in the water just beyond where the waves started to break waiting for just the right one to come along and give them a ride. This sport can be very dangerous, I think. I’ll never know more, as attempting to even stand on a surfboard will never be in my future….

The place where we stopped had some fishermen, but no surfers. It isn’t much of a beach, actually. It was very rocky and a steep climb to get down to the water’s edge. It was also low tide. The tide had turned just about 45 minutes before we stopped. However, the waves were still pretty spectacular. I took a short 20 second video and posted it on YouTube:

It may do a bit of justice to the surf! While we were stopped there, Nina met and talked to a couple from Texas who had also stopped. They were here on the twentieth wedding anniversary and seemed to be having a great time.

We’re on the morning shift on Thursday through Saturday currently. That means putting up the US and Hawaiian Flags every morning. We “draft” a couple of sister missionaries to help with this process, which all of them enjoy doing. The process really takes three people to accomplish as cranking the flags all the way up to the top of the flagpole is quite a workout, so they always want to “share” the workload. The sister missionary on the left is Tongan and the sister on the right is Laotian (specifically Hmong). They are a lot of fun and are great missionaries. Neither of them ever turn down an assignment.

The holiday season is over … the Christmas Trees in the Visitors’ Center have all been taken down and put away for another year. The documentation as to which tree was put where and decorated by whom has been updated. Sometime next November the process will start all over again.

Another major clue that the holiday season is over is the change in the number of visitors to the Visitors’ Center! While a significant percentage of the visitors during the holidays were families on vacation, now we’re primarily seeing adult couples, many celebrating some important life event such as an anniversary or birthday. Many are retired and taking advantage of the slow season prices to come to Hawaii. We enjoy visiting with them and like that we can spend a little more one-on-one time with them. Today we had two couples from Turkey come into the Center and we had a nice visit with them about our way-too-short visits to Istanbul and Ephesus. We certainly have people visit from all over the world!

Another year is well underway. We’re coming up on ten months in Laie. It really does seem like it was just last week when we got here. Ta ta for now!