Nikko Saipan

... showing up shortly. It was also raining pretty badly with no sign of letting up. I ended up going over to the Bank of Guam lot to direct Hashers who hadn't seen the e-mail about the meeting location change.<br><br>The trail started off with an annoyingly long stretch of road in the rain. It eventually went into the boonies (and back out onto road, and back into the boonies ...

... were her church friends, certainly overwhelming the number of Hashers.<br><br>Now, for a side bar. There is a thing recently created called the Dark Side Hash, which is the kind of athletic pub crawl you find the Hash to be in many major cities. The instigator (an appropriate word for him) of the Dark Side Hash set the night for this night not realizing or not caring it was the same as Esther's party. When someone pointed this out, he then made the ...

... a bit hot. The road hadn't been traveled in a couple days; there were lots of spider webs all the way across the road. The recent dampness from the typhoon fringe (neither the Taiwan nor the Japan typhoons hit Saipan, but their fringes brought rain) followed by the clear sunny weather really stimulated the insects. There were clouds of gnats that sounded like a fully-charged Prius when you passed them. The butterflies, moths and caterpillars were abundant, and ...

... pretty easy for hiking, but I hadn't been through them before. The Hares put signs along the trail commemorating intersections with various Droolbag trails and events that occurred on them.<br><br>Things were pretty wet from the rains in the morning. At one point climbing out of a ravine, I slipped on the loose mud, fell over sideways, and banged my left hip. Twice. It left a welt and a nice raspberry that persists even as I write this.<br><br>Speaking of raspberries (no ...

... phone plan she's part of and her calls to me are all through calling cards and usually from Global anyway. The apartment here has all been cash transactions with minimal receipts that Suka didn't think we needed to keep. Her apartment at Global is an unwritten part of her employment agreement. She has no utilities in her name and no credit card bills. Essentially, it's lots of documentation limited by the way things are done in Saipan in many cases.

... lunch and lo and behold! There was a letter from USCIS! I grabbed it and played coy as I walked back to the car where Suka was waiting. She wanted me to open the letter. I quickly but neatly tore it open. It was an offical Notice of Action. They had sent it to invite her to do her biometrics on April 29. It was dated April 1. She already did the biometrics when we had the interview. It was a total misfire. That's the tease.

... was helping run the bar. I wanted something other than beer. Travis pointed out that they had some good tequila. I ordered one. That's the point when people decided to start buying me birthday drinks, mostly matching what I was already drinking. A couple of the drinks came from Bill. Keep in mind this was sipping tequila, not shots, so it didn't have the harsh impact many of you may be thinking about. Knowing it was going to be a ...

... is a Chinese treat that Suka hadn't had for ten years. Imagine a mildly sweet twisted donut, sort of a cross between a plain donut and a Jewish knot bread (I forget the real name) with a density closer to the knot bread than a typical donut. Lin had found a local baker who made them and gave a few to us. On the way from Lin's house to drop off the gear, we swung by the movie theater to ...

The next couple of days were pretty uneventful. Suka worked Monday night. Monday afternoon I did a final bike ride and ended it at Global so I could leave my bike there. I made dinner Monday night, a basic tomato sauce pasta enhanced with sauteed vegetables. Tuesday night Suka made her wonderful short ribs (kalbi). We packed me and the apartment up and took most things back over to her apartment. The only things left were some kitchen supplies ...

Suka and I got off to a slow start on Sunday. We wanted to get sleep while we could. We went to Shirley's for breakfast after picking up scuba (I did the formal abbreviation in the title for flourish) gear at Mr. Li's Dive Saipan. We went home, changed, grabbed my gear, and took off to Lau Lau Beach (map pin). The road wasn't too bad. They've done some repairs on it. There were only two places where we risked bottoming out the ...