Halloween Eastern WA Style

We drove over to Eastern Washington this past weekend for the annual pheasant scare. (I guess I shouldn't call it that since Bill & Dennis generally get a pheasant or two for all their traipsing around the Palouse.) We went sans Tucker who had to stay home to work.

On Saturday, Dennis goes out with Bill and I usually drive from Pullman to Colfax to visit Aleta. So here's a few pictures from the trip.

Spencer, Kimberly and Leah played a rousing game of Phase 10. Much to Spencer's chagrin, Kimberly pulled out a win on the last Phase. The girls are getting so grown up looking. Kimberly is a Junior in high school and Leah in in 8th grade--same as Spencer.

James is looking more grown up all the time too. It's hard to beleive he is 5 already. Of course I am always thinking he is older than that. He had a great time with Cooper and was sad to see him leave (or maybe it was the Lego men that Cooper had brought with him).

Jumping on the trampoline is always a fun time too. The kids stayed out there for quite awhile, even though it was a very blustery day. They had some game going that involved someone laying in the middle pretending to be a "dead man". James was in 7th heaven to have two new playmates, and boys at that!

After our day at Aleta's we headed back to Bill's house in Pullman to get ready for Halloween. Cooper & Laura carved pumpkin together. Then Cooper

got dressed to go trick-or-treating. He was very excited to be the Grim Reaper. I especially like the skeletal gloves. Kind of creepy.

Laura & Spencer volunteered to take Cooper out in the neighborhood and although neither of them dressed up, they still managed to come back with their pockets full of candy. The said they never actually asked for candy, that people just gave it to them. Cooper made quite a haul with his pillowcase too of course.

Now last but not least, the creepy family photo. I hate the inside out eyelid thing that Dennis does, but you have to admit that it does make a great Halloween picture!

Hawaii

So here are a few pictures from our trip to Hawaii. We were there from October 17th to October 24th--so a nice long trip. It was alot of fun and a very relaxing trip. The first picture is of a the catamaran we got to go on for a sunset cruise. It was a very balmy evening and I didn't get seasick, but Dennis did. We did the cruise on Wednesday. The new picture of us on the side panel of the blog is from this cruise.

The first picture is the helicopter we got to ride in for an hour tour around Maui. That was the way coolest thing we got to do on our trip. It was amazing! I've always wanted to ride on one so this was pretty awesome. This is the view from the helicopter of the hotel strip where we were staying on the north end of the island. We stayed at the Westin Ka'anapali.

This trip we decided to take the road to Hana which is a 30 mile windy, twisty road on the south end of the island. This was one of the stops along the way. The water was this incredible blue and there was all these volcanic formations in the water. This one kind of reminded me of a turtle. It was really cool to see the waves crashing against the rocks. There was a blowhole but no water ever shot up through it.

This is another shot from the road to Hana. There was this cute little town way down in the valley with a white clapboard church that looked really cool. I was trying to frame it through the plants. I thought the pictured turned out kind of cool.

Dennis went boogie boarding with this other couple that we spent quite a bit of time with. We found this great beach just north of where we were staying and the waves were really good. Some of them would have gone right over people's heads if they were standing up as they came in. I didn't do any boogie boarding myself, but Dennis had a great time.

I don't know how we missed this tree the first time we went to Maui. It is in this square in Lahaina a little coastal, tourist town on the north coast. It is a huge banyan tree. I know it looks like alot of trees, but is is all one tree. You can see all the twisted, gnarled stuff in the middle, but all the ones that look like separate trees surrounding the middle stuff is part of the main tree. The sign says there are 19 different major "trunks" for this one tree. It was totally cool.

Yes, I know there aren't really any pictures of me and Dennis, but we didn't really take any of ourselves. It was kind of weird to be there without the kids to take pictures of. We only took a few of us and they weren't all that great. Oh well. It was a really fun trip though.