I'm Back

I hope that all of you are doing well and are enjoying the summer.  My family and I are having a blast.  I took a brief break from blogging because my family and I were on our annual vacation to Oahu for 10 beautiful days.  Even though we have only been back for 2 days we miss being there already. At the end of the next few posts or so I will giving you a glimpse of what we did while we were in Oahu.  A week ago today this evening I went out to dinner with my tea swap friends.  We usually go out for tea when we meet up, but this time we met up for dinner at a Chinese restaurant.

Look at all the delicious food that we ordered.

I was kidding around and asked that we order bitter melon.  We did order it.  I was surprised that all of them like bitter melon like I do.  All the food was super ono, but my favorite was the stuffed fried egg plant.  Each year when we meet we surprise each other with a handmade gifts.  I purchased a tea pot and with the help of my hubby made tea cup. 

I put two tea bags in the cup, tea cookies, and included a tea bag rest with their gift.

I put everything is a bag and attached a tag with a special message for each of them on the back.

Here is a close up picture of the tag.

This is from Brenda.  She made us each a cute pouch, a pin, and ordered a magnet for us with pictures from our tea gather last year.

This is from Dori. Inside the boxes are yummy goodies and the bag with the tea bags has a beautiful tea bag rest.

This is from Fran.  She gave each of China from her grandma, a beautiful succulent, and a handmade tea pot with mocha inside.

Last but not least this is from Melanie.  Look at all the cool stuff that she put in the box.

I love all the creative and thoughtful gifts from each of them.  I am grateful to each of them for taking time to meet up with me while I was visiting.  We keep in touch during the year, but it is always more fun to chat in person.  As promised here are a few pictures from our vacation.  This is our view from the balcony of our hotel.

We had the opportunity to visit the Iolani Palace.  The tour of the palace was amazing.

We also got to visit the Sentate building which was pretty cool.

The entry was in one of the episodes of Hawaii 5-0, one of my favorite TV shows.

One last picture for today is the onolicious breakfast that I ate twice from McDonalds- spam, eggs, sausage, and rice.  One of the times I had Kona coffee and guava pie too.  It would be nice to be in Oahu once again enjoying my HI style breakfast sitting on our balcony enjoying the beautiful view. 

Thanks for stopping by.  Have a wonderful weekend!