The REAL 4th

So I think the Russells have a new tradition: Various odd fruit night. The night of the 6^th we went shopping and as I was browsing the fruit section I saw a fruit that caught my eye. It looked a little something like this:

Being in an adventurous mood I decided to try it. My sisters picked up on the idea of buying strange fruit. Christin picked up a coconut and Mini decided to get asparagus. Nothing too crazy, I guess, but other than my fruit there wasn’t anything we’ve never tried before. Anyway, turns out my fruit was a dragonfruit, and we had to look up online how to cut and eat it.

Turns out everything was delicious! The coconut was fun to break open and drain. The dragonfruit was really sweet and dyed everything it touched red. The asparagus, well, we cooked it wrong and had to throw it away.

So the REAL 4^th of July celebration came for us on July 7^th. By boss, Harold, has this tradition that he and his family watch the Makawao paradethat morning then have a BBQ at his place afterwards. He invites various and sundry other people as well and they just see who shows up. So he invited Bret and I (and I asked if I could bring my family and got the OK on them, too). So at 8:30 we all plunked our seats down and waited for the parade. My brother-in-law Steve and my sister Mini were there, too. The parade was really funny – typical small town parade. Probably every classic car on the island was there. Then came the different clubs and stuff. Here’s a couple pictures of the Democratic parties festivities – one of the more colorful displays I’ve ever seen. They had loud music, women dancing on stilts, people in corn suits, etc.:

And as Steve is fond of telling everyone, Harold was the star of the parade. He heckled about everyone that went by. He had a thing going with the people around him where they’d try to guess the year of the car going by. Of course that meant to settled the wager he had to yell at every car to ask the year. Some times he’d just yell, “How’d you sneak that car into the parade?!” or “What’s the deal with your float?!” One local business owner drove by and Harold yelled, “Hey, where’s the Kama ‘aina discount, man?! I can’t afford to eat at your place!”

Afterwards was a BBQ at Harold’s place. He’s got a beautiful plot of land with a cool house on it.

Every 4^th of July Makawao also hosts a rodeo that’s pretty famous in the islands. I think it’s the biggest in the state. We dropped by, but at $10 a head we decided it wasn’t worth it. We were all tired and weren’t planning on hanging around long anyway. So that was the real 4^th of July.