Hawaii!

From Moscow, it takes an eternity to travel to Hawaii. From Alaska, it's a direct flight and just a couple of time zones, so in August we decided to take advantage and pay a visit to our Hawaiian friends and family.

Checking out the fish pond with Aunt Carole Anne; fun in the sand with Uncle Cam; a stroll with Aunt Carole Anne

Our good friends (and amazing hosts), Thomas and Claudia, recently moved to Honolulu for faculty positions at the University of Hawaii. What perfect timing! Well, perfect timing for us, anyway. We (and particularly Turo) surely made it hard for them to keep up with their research and many other obligations during our visit!

More Hawaiian family? Yes! We're feeling very connected in Hawaii these days and were so excited to get to see everyone, despite our short visit. Right photo: with (L-R) Uncle Jerry, Aunt Kamaile, Uncle Ned and Aunt Betsy

Arturo got a new camera during our trip, and he's very proud of his work!

It takes some time to sort through his hundreds of interesting shots (and way too many are of me in my bathing suit!), but for having a camera that's under 1 megapixel and has no focus or lighting/flash options, he's been able to capture some pretty nice moments. The remainder of the pictures in this blog entry were taken by Arturo...

Out for Korean with Claudi and Thomas; partial view from C&T's lanai (the full view is actually quite expansive, but Arturo's photos pretty much all focus on the highway :-)

Beachy

Self Portraits