Cave and Kitchen Adventures

This was a fairly uneventful week and weekend. Today, I went hiking to the underground cave/swimming "pool" at Pagat Point with a friend. I don't have picutures because of the water, but maybe I will work something out the next time I go there.

Yesterday there was a sizable fire across the island which filled the air at my house with smoke and floating ash. Today, the fire seemed smaller but closer. For anyone who did not know already, not only does Guam suffer from occasional typhoons, regular earthquakes and persistant hot hot hot weather, we also have grass fires in the dry season. Fun.

I did not really want to spend time outside yesterday with the smoke, so I embarked on an adventure in the kitchen. I decided to make pierogis. The inspiration for this adventure was a combination of reading too much of a food blog online and an honest craving for homemade pierogis, like we have in back home in NEPA.

Some of them looked decent, and some of them didn't. I will only show you a good looking one. However, they tasted fine, but just not right. Not the exact taste I was hoping for. Ah, well, it was my first try at homemade pierogis, and now I have many of them in my freezer. Who knows, maybe they taste better when I have not spent almost two hours making them... even though the recipe said 45min.

In other news, I have started training for the 2.5 mile ocean swim from a small island off Guam, back to Guam. The race is at the end of May, and I think it will be fun. My training parter and I swam for an hour on Friday, and that was probably the longest I have swum (swam?) continuously in a long time. I will keep you posted on my progress!

Just for good measure, and especially for Katie, who likes to see picture with me actually in them (as opposed to behind the camera), here is a picture from our accidental overnight hike a couple months ago. There are several more over on Flicker, including a few shots of the luxury accomodations we stayed in.

The short version of the story is this: We (Tom, Steve and I) shuttled cars to achieve a one way full-day hike, the book got dropped off the side of the mountain, the trails in Guam are notoriously poorly marked, we hiked in what now seems like the wrong direction for hours, most likely on a pig trail (yes, I said pig trail), it got late, we decided to sleep in an abandoned old radio tower shack (to avoid getting more lost), at first light we found a trail and it took us roughly 20 min to hike out - to a road that was many many miles from where we parked a car, a friend picked us up, end of short version.