Aunt "Argie"

As you know, my Aunt Margie (my mom's sister) came to visit last week. Margie and I have not lived in the same town for many years, and we've only had the opportunity to see each other a couple times in the past few years. In fact, this was only the second time that Margie had seen either one of my kids, so it was great to spend some time with her.

Both kids took to her right away. Zander couldn't quite say "Margie" so he called her "Argie" all week. Here they are on their very first day hanging out with her. First she tried to teach Zander some golfing techniques (her husband Mike is a golf pro). As you can see, he sort of developed his own method after awhile . . . not so much like golfing, but more like chopping at the ball.

Then they settled in for a story . . .

During one of our driving tours, we stopped at Turtle Beach and we FINALLY got to see a sea turtle up on the shore (we had only seen turtles there once before, back in August, but haven't seen any in the many times we've been there since). Thankfully there are what we call "turtle police" in the area who are volunteers that make sure people don't harass the turtles (which unfortunately happens quite a bit).

These next pictures are from a drive we took through Kolekole Pass on the west side of the island, which shows quite a different landscape than the east side of the island . . . this side gets much less rain, and as a result is not very lush compared to the other side.

In fact, it's so dry on this side of the island that these enormous cactus plants are all over the place.

We stopped at the top of the pass to take some of these pictures, and a fellow member of the military stopped to take pictures as well. He was driving a Jeep, so of course Zander went nuts and was totally climbing all over this stranger's vehicle. The gentleman was really nice and said that Zander could drive his Jeep. Thus, you are witnessing Zander's first auto theft.

And Aunt Margie is helping . . . (thanks Marge)

Once we got to the bottom of the pass, we stopped at a beautiful beach to take some more pictures.

We had a great time with Marge here, and we got to seem some pretty cool new stuff that we hadn't seen before. So thanks for a great visit Aunt Argie!