Wednesday, February 25, 2009

We made it to the ocean!

We are still sick. Maybe we are getting a bit better. Ashley's immune system is on overdrive, resulting in golf ball size lymph nodes in her neck. Joel has a lot of oozing from his nose. But- we are at the beach!
After a very dangerous, slippery, and beautiful cliff trail, we found the ocean hanging out with some lava rocks. Joel says hello to the elements.
The water here, even in rough spots, is a magical blue that doesn't seem quite right to our Atlantic Ocean eyes.
A Buddha on our farm collects heart-shaped rocks. Ashley's addition is the orange one on the chest.
Joel spots our soon-to-be home. For right now, we are staying in the guest house till the other WWOOFer couple moves out of our barn-tent on March 7th.
Notice the huge bump on Joel's brain. We hope it was a mosquito who made that.
Also notice the two young papaya trees growing in the middle ground as well as the coconut-producing palm trees in the back. We have already munched some coconut and are looking forward to chopping our own coconut down from a swaying palm during a heavy windstorm.

We made it to Maui!

After sleeping at the airport in what was possibly the most uncomfortable sleeping positions ever attempted, we spot Maui from above. This is the North Shore, where we will be. Rocky cliffs. Large waves crashing, making foam and making us excited.

Joel never traveled very far from home as a youth. Now look at him!As we get closer to the airport, which is really just one landing strip and one takeoff strip, we spot Haleakala- an enormous non-active volcano that is sort of world famous for its sunrise views. The peak is somewhere above those clouds in this picture.
Ashley's wants to bite Maui. (Hawaiian Airlines tried to feed us turkey sandwiches for lunch- and gave no alternative.) (We're vegan.)
Notice the unearthly blue hues and the small ET in the upper right corner!

We made it to Seattle!

The Empire Builder, so it is called, takes us through Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota- places like that. We see a buffalo, one of our goals. No moosies are spotted outside of fantasy. The spellchecker on this blog says that moosies isn't a real word but we don't agree.
Ashley takes a bunch of intuitive photographs with her art camera at the passing scenery. (Some might call these "snapshots" but we don't agree.)
Ashley is sick. So is Joel. Ashley has also turned into a hairless cartoon character.
A restaurant called Bambuza in Seattle feeds us this meal, which was our first real meal in three days. We had been munching and crunching on granola bars and Indian food packets and other weird things on the train.
The pictured meal consists of Vietnamese Pho soup (mushrooms, chives, broccoli, carrots, napa cabbage, bean sprouts, jalapenos, and hoisin sauce) and green bean tofu prepared in a wok. (We love woks.) This meal was our favorite one ever. Really! We want to go back to this Bambuza land someday in the future and we hope you will too.
We spent many hours walking up and down hills in Seattle, attempting to decode the bus system so that we could visit an Asian art museum across town. But, the decoding attempts lead us astray. We found a market shop called Ralph's that Ashley once dreamt about but had never seen or knew existed. A vegan sushi wrap from this dream market filled our bellies with energy and took over half of Joel's face, prompting him to protrude his tongue at the intruder, bus maps in hand.

We made it to Chicago!

Train station- Ashley- intrigued ET in sky hovering toward brain
ET comes after Joel and takes interest in the camera
We are not sure about this place. Buildings are tall and trees are sparse. People walk fast.
An organic restaurant called "Spa Cafe" feeds us this meal. Purple soup, rice paper tortilla with sprouts, mushrooms, lettuce inside. A Bed of Lettuce.
And a seitan burger called the "Devil Burger" because seitan sounds like Satan. It wasn't good. The purple substance is a spicy Hawaiian sweet potato soup. We couldn't resist taking in a bit of Hawaii before actually getting there.
Yum. But Joel was sick and looked over the dipping sauce for that wrap.

So: We made it to Chicago. We've been very sick on the train with some sort of cold. No fun! We dream of Maui and hope to be healed soon.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Last-Minute-Muffins



2:00AM, night before we leave

not packed yet.

this is the way of the muffins.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

An Invitation


We invite all of our friends and family to come visit us in Maui.

This is what the Kahua Hawaiian Institute has to say about that:
Depending on availability we can extend a special rate to your friends and family to visit during your stay.
The Kahua Hawaiian Institute's Maui Retreat

Our plans


Greetings! Welcome to our very first blog ever.
We're going to Hawaii in 3 days to volunteer on organic farms in exchange for shelter and food through the WWOOF program (world wide organization of organic farms.)






These are our travel plans:
Feb 19th: Leaving Greensburg, PA by train. Arriving in Pittsburgh that night. Dinner with Joel's parents. More train.
Feb 20th: A stopover in Chicago. Vegan foodstore visits. More train.
Feb 20-21st: Staring out the windows at the moosies and buffalosies.
Feb 22nd: Arriving in Seattle, WA. Wandering around Seattle looking for vegan munchies all day long. Looking for a place to sleep. Going to the airport early in the morning.
February 23rd: Arriving on Maui at 2:35pm (Hawaiian Time!)

This is our train route:
Amtrak Empire Builder

This is where we will be WWOOFing:
The Kahua Hawaiian Institute

And this is the WWOOF-Hawaii webpage:
http://www.wwoofhawaii.org/content/start.html

We are excited.