Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Finally updated

Sorry, sorry. I know it has been a long time. I was sick for a week after my last post. That was pretty neat because for some reason, we still haven't hired any new attorneys since I've been here, despite the fact that we're 5 attorneys short of a full staff. This makes no sense at all to me. The pay here isn't great that's true, but plenty of jobs are overrun by applications at prosecutors' offices everywhere for similar or less pay. They give us housing and the chance to live in the South Pacific. Anyway, this means that since I have court every day and the other attorneys have other court, I pretty much can't call in sick without totally shafting someone. So I went to court and then after the court part ended, I went home and went to sleep. This not only sucked but left me unprepared every day. I think the judge recognized my plight though, so he was pretty easy on us. Last week, I guess I don't have a good excuse.

Last weekend (the 17th), I was feeling better, so on Saturday we went to check out Nuuuli Falls. There are really 3 u's in a row. The trailhead to this place is about a 5 minute drive from my house. I'd heard that the falls are easy an easy hike and weren't all that spectacular.

We drove to the trailhead, which is a pig farm and headed up the trail.


Unfortunately, we lost the trail right away and ended up hiking up the creek for a while (maybe 25 minutes) before we found the trail again.






After that it was only about 5 minutes or so hiking to the falls.

I was shocked by the falls. They're about 80 feet high and are pretty impressive. At the bottom, the pool is about 6 feet deep. It is really refreshing. There's not much cool water around here since the ocean is like bathwater. You can go swim under the falls. It was extremely pleasant.





Nate's shoes broke on the way back, so he improvised.


Then, after we got our excercise in, we made some spodde in the vat. It was pretty good and still was good later when it was recharged by wine and rum.


Ruth and Shelley went to a wedding and brought back a giant plate of food too:



On Father's Day, we hung out here and did nothing except watched dvds all day. We did leave the house for about 5 minutes to go to McDonalds. McDonalds is always packed, so it was shocking when we went there and there were zero cars in the parking lot. The place is usually packed even at 4am. We got the $15 family meal:


Last week, I was feeling much better and everything went mostly smoothly aside from traffic court which had a super long calendar. The weather has mostly been pretty cool for here lately.

Shelley's daughter Bonnie is in town to visit. On Friday we went to Rubbles Bar for dinner and then came back here and hung out.

Eventually there was dancing:


Saturday, we got up to go hiking. After some difficulty finding the trailhead, we made it to the place where you park, which is just on somebody's land. We asked some high school kids there if this was the way to Massacre Bay. They said, "you want to hike to Massacre Bay?" I informed them that they did and they said ,"are you sure?"

After some initial problems finding the trail (becuase you just walk by several peoples' houses and through their yards), we started down the hill.

For this hike, you drive to the highest point (I think) that you can get to by car on the island and head down towards the north side. At the top is about the nicest place to live that there is on the island. There are tremendous views from there and the air is noticably cooler.



The trail was muddy and really steep in portions. It was kind of hard to keep from falling down in many places. Bonnie did almost the entire hike down barefoot though. It didn't even seem to faze her and she jumped from fallen log to fallen log a few times.


It took us about an hour and forty minutes to scramble down to the bay. It is a very nice place.




We swam in the water for quite a while and then explored around the area. There are old fales there which are pretty run down. There's also a monument to some French sailors that were killed, hence the Massacre part. Apparently, during the 1700s a French ship was in town and things were going ok. When they were heading out, they decided to show off their guns and shot over the heads of the Samoans. This was taken as a threat and the Samoans attacked the ship before it could leave. 38 Samoans got killed, but because of the slow reloading of guns back then, a bunch of Frenchies got beaten to death with clubs as well. The French put up a monument there:

Towards one end of the bay a cool stream flows into the ocean.

The hike back nearly started badly by losing the trail, but luckily Markus was paying attention to where we were going.

We made it to the top in about the same time as we took to get down.

Don was massacred by the hike.




But, he made it.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Aaron, good to hear from you again. Looks like a sweet hike. I also hiked this weekend - Mt. Olympus. The Mt. Olympus hike was probably different from your hike in every possible way I can think of. First, we started at the bottom and hiked up, as is customary for hikes named "Mt." anything. The elevation gain is four thousand and some change over 3.2 miles, pretty steep, but the end is best part. The last .2 miles are all bouldering and scrambling up to the summit, where the view is very impressive in all directions. The high that day was 101 so we started early and summitted about 10am. Much of the hike is shaded, but we felt the heat on the way back down. Our next hike is going to be Gobbler's Knob, which will get us up over 10,000 feet. Then after that I would really like to do King's Peak, the highest point in Utah at 13,528 feet - just 900 feet shy of Ranier, but the hike is 100% easier. William got 5 stitches in forehead on Father's day, dining room table jumped out in front of him. His current favorite thing to say is "apple pie". Kate can walk down stairs by herself, a feat William has not mastered, and her favorite word is popsicle - although she says locksicle. I'll email you some pics when I get around to it. I started a Picasa site for posting pics - I'll create a public folder and send out the link. Glad to hear you're feeling better.

Turtle said...

Oooooo...I heart waterfalls!

Is there seafood there typical of the Northwest like oysters, steamer clams and dungeness crab?

Unknown said...

I don't really think so about the seafood. There's lots of different kinds of fish, but I don't think that crab on the blog is from here, though I could be wrong. I haven't seen any oysters or clams. We get mussels here in the stores, but they are from New Zealand. Of course that doesn't mean anything here, there could be abundant shellfish that people just don't get for no reason.