Happy Thanksgiving from Hana

We are celebrating this Thanksgiving holiday in Hana, Maui, one of the most remote places in Hawaii, and perhaps on earth. (George Harrison maintained a house here, and who can blame him?) This continues a tradition we have established over the past few years with friends, renting a house on a neighbor island, trucking in a turkey and trimmings, and settling in to avoid Black Friday and just enjoy a nice old-fashioned feast and fellowship with friends.

After a short but pricey flight from Honolulu, stopping in Kahului to pick up overpriced supples we didn't want to carry on the plane, we headed out for the 68-mile drive on the Hana Highway, a truly secondary road with 59 old bridges (most of them one-laners approached sharply after one of the 620 tight curves on the coast hugging road).  Making this trip special was driving in the dark and in the rain.  I was getting a little car sick in the slow-moving rocking and swaying Jeep, but that eventually faded as the burdens of our office lives were left behind. We found our house, our friends greeting us with drinks and a hot supper. After a good night's sleep, we awoke to this view out the front window:

There Ought to be Sheep

The view out the back, through a screened lanai, is of a small residential community (and our trusty rental Jeep) with Hana Bay and the ocean on the near horizon:

After assembling the turkey for roasting, my contribution to the team effort of Thanksgiving dinner, my friend and I took a stroll around the neighborhood, a domestic botanical garden of delights.

A curious drooping floral thing in the back garden of our rental house:

A hot pepper plant in someone's yard:

Roadside bananas:

Butterfly feasting:

We continued our walk to the bay, but my camera battery failed: we will revisit to document the lovely seaside vistas.  The feasting butterfly reminded of us of our turkey back in the oven, soon to be savored.

Although my Chinese painting teacher focuses on "flower and bird" painting, I doubt this was what she has in mind:

Truth be told, this bird and flowers are from 2007's holiday in Kula, "up-country" Maui, the wildflowers gathered from a similar stroll along the country road while the turkey roasted.  The turkey tastes the same.  I like to carve it with an antique fork and knife (like a stag-horn handled jian) that were wedding presents to my parents.  Our 2009 feast turned out to be just as colorful, with green spinach, orange yams, yellow stuffed acorn squash and the delicious purple okinawan sweet potatoes (which were never part of my mother's traditional feast which tended to be a bit more monochromatic).

The whole day was sunny and cheerful, but at night we had really heavy rain again, making it hard to hear the DVD movies we had brought along for group entertainment. But now it is sunny again, time to walk off yesterday's indulgences with a visit back to the bay, to photograph the scenes we missed yesterday.