Enjoying nature on the sabbath day

We like to take walks on Sunday. It is our day of rest, and we don't do too much besides going to church, but we do like to take a Sunday walk. This week, we went to a boardwalk trail over Jordan Creek. I'm not sure what the real name of it is, but it was beautiful. We of course found the trail by way of geocaching, so that was a little bonus...but the cache was right at the beginning of the trail. We walked really far back into the trees to a little river. The weather (as per usual) was slightly rainy, and the clouds were just resting in the trees. It was so beautiful the way the mist just hung in the trees. I was able to get a few really good shots of it. My favorites are the first one, and the fourth one.

Our Banana Tree

We have a banana tree (actually five of them) in our backyard. They were planted about a year and a half ago by one of our previous gardeners....the owner pays for the gardener, not us. He planted two trees, one larger one and one smaller one. Since that time the larger one has sprouted one new banana tree out of it's base, and the smaller one has two growing out of it (the last picture is of the smaller one, and you can see one of it's babies to the right side of the picture and if you click on the picture to make it bigger you can see the other tinier one on the left side of the trunk.) Anyway, the gardener told us it took a couple of years to actually get bananas to grow, so we were never expecting any, but last Monday all the kids came screaming in from the backyard to tell us that the banana tree had grown a banana flower and you could see the tiny bananas starting to grow. After I realized that no one was bleeding or dead (they were really screaming, all of them, and it was hard to know what exactly was going on) I ran out with them to see the banana flower. It was awesome! Here are some pictures.

The first three pictures were taken on March 28th, and the second three were taken on April 4th. It is amazing to me that they are growing so rapidly! Monday we had to peek under the flower petal to see the bananas and five days later there are three sets of huge bananas and more coming!

Random pictures from the Iao Needle

This is the Iao Needle (it is pronounced ee-yow)

This is a leaf....and I don't remember what type it is right now, but if I remember, I will post it.

Flowers

This is a Papaya tree. I love how the fruit grows right off of the trunk.

This is a wet taro field. The Hawaiians use the root to make poi.

This is the Iao Stream.

Palm trees for Heather