Pouring My Art Out

I met a nice horse… on Maui… well, I met a few nice horses on Maui, but this was the first one I got to pet…

Posted on May 21, 2014 by pouringmyartout

So we woke up very early that first morning on Maui. We hadn’t adjusted to the time change yet. We took another walk on that black-sand beach and found this beautiful river feeding into the sea…

Well, technically speaking, we watched the sun come up from our balcony first.. sort of… because of all the clouds…

But I thought the river picture would look better on the reader pages that I tag this post for…

Anyway, after our morning walk, we drove even further along the coast of the island. If you look at the maps I put in the first few posts I did about our trip, you sill see that this is the day we actually went around the Northeast tip of the island.

I was just taking some random pictures of the mountains while my wife drove the monster-pus-green Mustang…

The whole island is so lush and beautiful I could have taken a picture every five seconds while I was there…

But then we would never be finished looking at them, would we?

We were driving on a very narrow road still…

And then I saw these cows…

The cows with the ocean in the background reminded me of parts of Northern California. And then, all of a sudden, I spotted horses… you know I loves the horses…

Well, of course I made my wife stop the car in the middle of the road so I could jump out and try to pet a horse. I was making that clicking noise, trying to get one of these two horses to come over to me… because horses, like dogs and babies, love me…

Both of these horses sort of ignored me. But from farther away, this sweet little guy came ambling over…

I scratched him behind the ears, and took this picture. I was going to get a picture of me actually petting him, but my wife started honking at me… she was blocking the road.

Posted in dogs and other animals, My travels, Stories of my life | Tagged cows, hawaii, horses, humor, maui, nature, photography, travel, vacation, writing | 14 Comments

Okay, one more post, and that will take us to the end of our first day on Maui… HA!

Posted on May 20, 2014 by pouringmyartout

After our long and exciting drive on the road to Hana, Maui, we at last reached our destination… Hana. It is a very small town, and very spread out. I don’t even really have any pictures of it, although my wife might on her phone… when I get to those pictures. You could just Google Hana. It is a charming little town nestled in the hills and jungle along the coast. The foliage is so dense that you can rarely see more than one or two buildings from any one vantage point.

But our hotel… the Hana Kai Maui… was awesome…

That is it in the distance… on that black-sand beach… oh yeah! That is also a picture of my wife too… she is over there to the right. She doesn’t really want to be in the blog, but since she is so covered up in rain gear, that should be okay. The beach is actually larger black stones over closer to the hotel. The stones get smaller and smaller the further down the beach you go from the hotel until they are just black sand. Here is the view from our balcony…

Nice, huh? Yes, it rained a lot while we were there… which was only for one night… but as I said before, you don’t get jungle unless you are willing to settle for some rain. Here is a picture of me standing on our balcony…

Okay, it isn’t the best picture of me, but it is a nice silhouette of my cheek mole. Our room was quite lovely…

But the deck was my favorite part…

The first picture in the post, the one of the black beach, was taken shortly after we arrived. We went for a walk on the beach. And the first thing I found on that walk was a blowhole…

I like that picture… I got a little wet taking that picture… and of course I had to have my wife take a picture of me standing beside the blowhole…

Oh yeah, look at me in my action/adventure tourist gear… what a goober… but I was having so much fun. This big chunk of black lava sticking out into the tumultuous sea was right below the hotel. We met these two cool locals who were fishing from these rocks with multiple poles. It turned out that they fished late into the night, because we could see their flashlights moving around in the darkness. I took this picture from the same place…

Yes, it was windy and rainy and a little bit chilly…

And the surf was really booming. Of course we had to walk down that beach. It was our first day on Maui!

Later we went into town and got some frozen lasagna and cooked it in the full kitchen in our hotel room. Then we enjoyed the sunset…

Okay, the clouds sort of hid the sunset… but we saw plenty of sunsets on our trip. And as you can see from this picture taken the next morning, the clouds sort of feel like they are an important part of the landscape in Hana…

Besides, the view from the other side, out our front door, was less inspiring… unless you count our cool, monster-vomit-green Mustang…

Okay… I hope you join me tomorrow for lots more pictures of the rainy side of Maui… and jungle, and animals, and waterfalls and beaches… and stuff.

Posted in My travels, Pictures of me, Stories of my life | Tagged current-events, hana, hawaii, humor, maui, nature, outdoors, photography, travel, writing | 14 Comments

A brief break from the jungle to see some… other jungle…

Posted on May 20, 2014 by pouringmyartout

One interesting thing we did on that first day in Maui was to take a break from driving through the jungle to actually pay money to go into this big botanical garden…

The views were spectacular, even by the standards of the road to Hana… I mean, when you leave the jungle and pay money to see other plants, you know the place looks interesting. I think that many of the flower pictures I shared with you earlier came from these gardens…

The gardens were perched way up on the hillside above the road, as you can see from that pictures above. But the view of the ocean was so nice, I took a few pictures of the same scene with different zooms…

There were ponds full of fish, and weird birds… like these crazy chicken/duck/turkey things, but somehow I missed getting a picture of them… maybe my wife has some on her phone… I haven’t even gotten to her pictures yet…

All in all, it was worth the ten bucks we paid…

It was like a little side trip in paradise…

And I want to thank you for bearing with me as I share these hundreds of pictures and stories. I am totally reliving my trip.

Posted in My travels, Stories of my life | Tagged current-events, hawaii, humor, jungle, maui, nature, photography, travel | 6 Comments

Welcome to the jungle… part 3…

Posted on May 20, 2014 by pouringmyartout

There is just something about being in the jungle that makes me smile…

Maybe it is all those Tarzan books I read as a kid. Maybe it made me feel like a monkey. Or perhaps the crack squirrels that infest my cranium just loved looking at all those trees…

Now that is a lovely view, but there is something missing…

Yes, that’s better… it just needed my big, goofy head! One cool thing about the Maui jungle is that stuff grows on other stuff…

It really does blow your mind. And the jungle appeals to the artist in me… there are just so many shades of green…

The moisture in the air, the smells of life, the sounds of life… it just envelopes you…

Speaking of Tarzan, you know how they always showed him swinging on vines? Did you ever think that it was sort of ridiculous, like there was no way there were so many vines hanging around in the jungle waiting for him to come along and swing from them? Well…

It turns out that there are vines just hanging around in the jungle. But mostly it takes water to make a jungle…

The water and the jungle are like one entity…

They feed each other, and give each other life…

It really is the most incredible thing to see.

Posted in My travels, Pictures of me, Stories of my life | Tagged current-events, hawaii, humor, jungle, maui, nature, outdoors, photography, travel, writing | 10 Comments

Welcome to the jungle… part 2…

Posted on May 19, 2014 by pouringmyartout

Yeah, jungle and waterfalls on Maui… I guess I will just spend a couple of days posting random pictures of our drive to Hana…

Because… you know… jungles and waterfalls…

What could be cooler than that?

And I took a lot of pictures…

So I will try not to throw in too many words…

Just a line in between the pictures…

Just to separate them…

So they aren’t just sitting on top of one another…

And then I will go back to stringing them together with stories of what we did…

You know… like I do…

Posted in My travels, Pictures of me, Stories of my life | Tagged current-events, hawaii, humor, jungle, maui, nature, travel, waterfalls, writing | 36 Comments

Welcome to the jungle… part 1…

Posted on May 19, 2014 by pouringmyartout

Okay, I admit it… I took a lot of pictures of the jungle on the road to Hana on Maui…

Driving that car on that road was awesome. Yes, it rained off and on, but you can’t really have a jungle without rain…

And the rain does help keep the waterfalls flowing…

The very first of the famous waterfalls of the Hana road that we found were these delightful little set of double falls…

And it didn’t take me long to figure out that even in a jungle, there are a lot of different kinds of jungle…

There are roots and vines growing down over little caves, and places where the foliage was just so think you couldn’t have crawled through it…

And the bamboo… man, there was a lot of bamboo of so many types. There were hills covered in bamboo, and there was crazy big patches of this really fat kind of bamboo…

Is that a monkey? Oh… wait… sorry… that’s me in that bamboo. Of course, there was the ocean too…

Ocean and jungle are a cool combination. You can see the Hana road cut into the hillside over there. But even the ocean like the jungle itself, had many moods. When the sun was shining, the ocean was a spectacular blue like you would expect from an ocean around a tropical island. But when the clouds came over, it took on a slightly more sinister appearance…

That looks a little like Northern California. I guess it doesn’t really look all that sinister in that shot, but we will get back to that. The point here is that if you ever go to Maui, get yourself a crazy-colored Mustang convertible and drive this road…

You don’t even have to get out of the car to see some awesome views…

Posted in My travels, Pictures of me, Stories of my life | Tagged current-events, hana, hawaii, humor, jungle, nature, outdoors, photography, travel | 28 Comments

The road to Hana…

Posted on May 19, 2014 by pouringmyartout

Maui has this crazy road. And I must admit, that road was my favorite part of the whole trip, because I wanted to see some real jungle full of waterfalls… and believe me, I got my wish.

I already told you about the car we rented after landing on Maui. And I told you we stopped at a store and I met that cool old guy who was in the 82nd Airborne and dropped behind Nazi lines the night before the D-day landings. After that, we hit the road to Hana.

Here is a map of the North side of the island… the wet side…

On that map, the road between the airport and Hana looks pretty tame, doesn’t it? Here is what it looks like from the air, thanks to good old Google images…

Now you would think that just driving on a narrow, twisting road in rain showers in an unfamiliar car, often perched on the side of a cliff hundreds of feet above the ocean, would be exciting enough, right?

But what really sets the road to Hana apart is the fact that every few hundred yards, you get to these narrow, one-lane bridges…

You need to stop and let traffic coming the other direction go unless you get there first. The thing is… (we all knew there was a going to be at least one thing)… that it takes a while to get the hang of where and when to stop, so a lot of the other tourists, not being as smart as my wife and I, kept getting it wrong. I can’t tell you how many times people had to back up, or how many near-misses there were. The other thing is… (yay, two things in the same post)… that locals don’t care about the signs… because they own the road, so to speak. It is some crazy driving. Having a monster-vomit-green Mustang was actually quite useful… just because it made us very visible.

That picture above, also from Google images, makes it look like the bridges are all fairly new and in good shape. They weren’t… they mostly looked like this…

Once again, just so you know, that is not one of my pictures… these are all stock pictures… we will get to mine later today… and I have a lot of them… but these bridges were crumbling and old and very slippery.

Later on, we discovered that there is an entire industry on Maui devoted to selling t-shirts to people who made this drive…

We didn’t get the shirts, but maybe we should order some…

Or maybe I should write another children’s book with some new, original paintings…

Posted in My travels, Stories of my life | Tagged current-events, hawaii, humor, jungle, maui, nature, outdoors, road to Hana, travel, writing | 14 Comments

One more post of pictures of flowers from our trip to Maui…

Posted on May 18, 2014 by pouringmyartout

I think I am getting close to the point where I can start posting other pictures of our second honeymoon on the lovely island of Maui…

I have sorted and organized them…

I still have no idea exactly what order I am going to do them in…

Or how I will tie them all together with the stories of our adventures…

Whoah… look at the size of that flower… But fear not, I will manage. The crack squirrels will work overtime, and it will all come together…

I will take you from the wet and wild jungles to the wide, sunny beaches, from the top of a volcano to the reefs underneath the waves…

There will be food and drink and romance…

There will be culture and history… and of course, there will be fun and humor…

That last picture there is a bouquet of flowers that our family sent to us in honor of our 25th wedding anniversary. I never really thought about it before, but being a florist on a tropical paradise has its own unique challenges. When you are surrounded by flowers that look like… well… like all the pictures I have been showing you for the last few days… you really need to step up your game in order to impress anyone.

Posted in flowers, My travels, Stories of my life | Tagged current-events, flowers, hawaii, humor, love, maui, nature, paradise, romance, social-media | 36 Comments

100,000 views… stat monkey is so happy…

Posted on May 17, 2014 by pouringmyartout

I want to thank my friend, Twindaddy, ,

over at: http://stuphblog.com/

I was 4 hits away from my goal of 100,000 views, and I asked him to pop over and push me over the edge… and he did… because he is cool like that… so go check out his blog if you are one of the few people who don’t know him already…

Stat monkey wants you to know that there are still a few more stats we need to reach before he can take a banana break…

We are now at 95,304 comments. He wants to bump that up to 100,000 too, you know… just to keep up with the views.

That post we did called: ‘Comment here’… you know, the one where we are trying to break the record for the most comments on one WordPress blog… is now up to 27,620 comments. Stat monkey wants to try to reach 30,000. He is funny that way.

But leaving a comment on that post is a good way to meet some awesome bloggers and become a small part of history… here is the link that takes you to the end of the comments so you don’t have to scroll so far: http://wp.me/p25PYJ-21u/#respond

There is some weird stuff going on in those comments. I might print them all out someday and turn them into a coffee table book… or a play… maybe a musical… who knows?

Posted in stuff about blogging | Tagged art, blogging, blogs, current-events, humor, monkey, monkeys, social-media, wordpress, writing | 31 Comments

And we are back to the flower pictures…

Posted on May 16, 2014 by pouringmyartout

I like that picture. Those are not the most beautiful flowers we saw on Maui, but I took that picture in the garden of a lavender farm, way up on the side of the volcano we had just visited… you might remember the silver sword flowers from an earlier flower post… those were at the top of this same volcano. You can see the ocean in the distance.