Thanks for everything, I have no complaints what so ever.

I have spent a good portion of this trip taking pictures and sifting through pictures from the last 5 years. I feel like I know my way around a camera and yet it is so hard to get a shot I really love. Sometimes a picture captures something I couldn't see with my naked eye- it elevates a moment, brings out a quality I didn't know was there or isolates something that was getting lost in the cacophony of an experience. If I try to capture something specific I usually can't catch it.

This trip I have taken probably close to 1000 photos. I am happy to have had so much time to get my family in front of the lens and those photos will probably show up on this blog or some future blog. Tonight as I leave the island I want to show you my two favorite pictures from the trip. Blogspot is terrible for photo posts but its where I am at for now.

Max and I went on a bike ride down a lonely road. They all seem kinda lonely here, not many people and not much traffic. We found horses grazing as a storm rolled into a magnificent sunset. Max is a little nervous around horses and was in a bit of a stand off with this one.

At 6:00am my first morning I went for a ride around Waimea. I met a man named Teak who lives in the same corner of town as my parents. He was leaning out of the window of his house that had camouflage curtains, a gigantic jacked up truck, what seemed like a kennel of dogs and a fenced in yard with sheep. His massive tattooed arms were resting against the sill and his head was bald with a tattoo that rose from his neck to his forehead. The light was perfect and I knew this was the perfect shot...but I also knew that some scrawny white girl on a bike taking pictures at 6:00am might not go over to well with a guy with big arms, camo curtains and a bunch of angry dogs. So I asked him if I could photograph his sheep. He obliged and in the process noticed my tattoos peaking out of my sleeve. He asked me about them and we talked tattoos- his forearm was dedicated to a boar's head and I learned he was a hunter, waiting to go out hunting. Turns out he makes the best sausage in town. I went back to Teak's house several times. He showed me his dogs, told me about his hunt, his kids, his life. I never got the shot of him leaning out the window, but the shot I did get says everything I wanted to say.