I was in Campti, Louisiana last week for work. There were a couple of funny things that happened during the trip, so I thought I would write about them. Campti is too small of a town to actually stay there, so I stayed in Natchitoches. Think about how you would say that town name, you're completely wrong, it's pronounced Nack-A-Dish. I have no idea how they get that pronunciation from that word...confusing, but again, it is Louisiana and they pronounce things differently.
When I go on work trips I normally meet some of the operators that work in the paper mill. They are friendly and like to talk to me, probably because they don't get very many girls working around them. I wish I could have recorded some of the conversations I was in because their accents are so strong, it is sometimes hard to understand what they're saying, but kind of funny listening, too. One of the guys I was working with, Eddie, was pretty nice. He gave me suggestions on where to eat, gave me his phone number on the back of a map he drew in case I got lost, talked me into trying alligator tail, wanted me to try fried frog legs (no way!), made me laugh by making fun of another guy there that was taking dancing lessons so he could dance with his daughter at her wedding, and even made me this miniature little copper scorpion. Pretty funny. And no Annemarie, I wasn't interested in him. But I thought it was sweet that he made this little scorpion. So cute, I have it in my office, now.
A couple of more random things. I was driving into the mill one morning, listening to the local news and there was a story about these two women that got into a fight at the Wal-Mart in town. I guess one of the guys that was with one of them ended up grabbing some scissors off the shelf and repeatedly stabbed the other woman. He was arrested and being held for attempted man-slaughter. Needless to say, I decided to not go into Wal-Mart when I was looking for a place to grab a snack. I did have some good southern/Cajun food while I was there. Besides the fried alligator tail (which really wasn't that great), I tried some meat pies (basically meat empanadas), dirty rice, bbq pork sandwich, chicken po-boy (this is just a warm sandwich, but the chicken was seasoned so yummily), baked chicken, chocolate cream pie on a pecan crust and some peach cobbler. I know, it looks like I'm a pig, but I was there a few days. And I'm going back on Monday, so maybe a few more stories will come out of this trip.
They had Telekinesis open for them and they're from Seattle, they were the best opening band I've seen in a while. And Cut off Your Hands (they're from New Zealand), they were pretty good. I took a few small-sized videos, the image isn't very good, but the sound turned out pretty well.
For the most part, the other people on the trail were really friendly. We came up to this older couple that were going pretty slow. The lady had walking poles in both hands and was crawling along. I said, excuse me, can we pass? She said, yes, in the next wide spot. I thought that was pretty rude because there weren't any wide spots in the trail, especially with her taking up the whole trail. So, I just went around her anyway and Corinne and Nathan followed. Corinne kind of kicked her walking stick on accident and they yelled at us as we passed. Whatever, they were the rude ones.
Corinne and I after our long hike in.
After the hike to Hanakapi'ai Beach, we checked out the wet and dry caves. They really weren't anything too exciting, from what I could tell. And you can tell that Nathan was getting sick of me taking pictures of them.
We had wanted to snorkel at Ke'e beach, but it started raining, so we decided to head to Princeville. We found this beach when we were driving around trying to find the Queen's Bath. 
We spent part of the first day looking at some waterfalls. There's a couple that you can drive to and since we had a pt cruiser to get around in, we were all about driving around. That was actually the most annoying part about the trip, I tried changing the car, but they didn't have anything else available and I didn't want to spend more money. They were even saying it was an upgrade, but I'm sorry, those cars are really awful. Anyway, here are those waterfalls.
One of the funnest things we did was an ATV tour at Kipu Ranch. I know, it sounds like it could be a little cheezy, especially if you see their ads in the brochures, but it wasn't at all. We each had our own 4-wheeler and there were 6 other people on the tour with us. They gave us all a refresher course on driving the 4-wheelers before we headed out, they are pretty simple to operate, since they were one-speed. I hadn't been on one since I did something like this in Aruba. We looked pretty awesome with our goggles and helmets.
This mountain, Mt. Waiʻaleʻale, is supposedly the wettest spot on earth and gets over 400" of rain a year, but I haven't confirmed this. While we were on our tour, it was actually visible, we didn't see it during the remainder of the trip, since it was covered in clouds.
So, you might recognize this spot, watch Jurassic Park, it's in the scene where the guy and the two kids run away from the dinasours and hide behind the log. A lot of movies are filmed on this ranch. It's over 4000 acres and beautiful, so a great place to film things. 
Another waterfall where we stopped for lunch.
The trails we went on were very muddy and had lots of huge puddles. And some parts were really steep, so it was kind of scary, but fun at the same time. And I was able to stay a little clean by lifting my legs when I drove through some of the huge puddles. I tried taking a picture of all our arms, but you can see from Nathan's shirt how muddy we were. I think he was the muddiest, he was trying to get muddy, though and I was trying to avoid puddles.
Another thing this island has a lot of is wild pigs, just like in Lost, interesting, huh? (Although Lost is filmed in Oahu.) They can hunt the pigs, but not on the ranch, we saw a lot out here.
This waterfall was the last part of the tour and I thought this was going to be a nice place to swim, but the water was so muddy. Only Corinne was brave enough to get in. 
I really liked the design of all the buildings in the palace. They were so simple and used natural colors, a huge difference compared to the palace in Bangkok. One neat thing we learned about their living quarters was that underneath each of the buildings was a huge fireplace. This provided the heating for the home and since no one wears shoes inside thier homes, they needed heated floors. The chimneys for the underground fireplaces were piped 20-30 feet away from the building itself.
We caught our flight out of Bangkok at 2am and arrived into Seoul at 6am--Korean time, we slept a couple of hours and didn't have showers, so we look pretty awesome here. This day was the longest day I've ever had, after spending a full day in Seoul, we flew 9 hours to Seattle and then were home at 10am the same day. 
We also went to this river that runs through the city for about 4 miles. It's called the Cheonggyecheon Stream. It had a really nice walk-way, it would be a good place for a run. Oh, do you notice the jackets we're wearing? We were lucky to borrow some from the tour company. Mine fit perfectly, but Lance is wearing a woman's jacket, he has it pushed off his shoulders, otherwise, the arms would be 5" too short. I only laughed at him for a few minutes. At least we were able to stay warm, it was around 40 degrees here, compared to the 80 degrees we had in Thailand.
