To celebrate the incredible efforts of Passports With Purpose to raise a school in Cambodia, this week’s Wander Food Wednesday is dedicated to Sweet Asian Orchids. These delicate candied flowers are easy to make and almost always bring oh’s and ah’s when served!

The recipe is modified from Epicurious.

Ingredients:
edible flowers (organic, pesticide-free)
superfine sugar
1 egg white, at room temperature
1/4 cup water

To Prepare:
Brush petals with an egg white that is slightly beaten with a couple of drops of water.
Hold the petal with a tweezer, and sprinkle with superfine sugar. Tap the tweezer to remove excess sugar.
Remove to a rack to dry completely. Store in an airtight container.
Sugared flowers can be made in advance and stored with minimal wilting for up to one week.

This is the last week to support Passports With Purpose, so be sure to donate and GOOD LUCK winning those awesome prizes!
ENJOY!

These days it’s becoming easier to stay connected than ever before. World phones, Wi-Fi in the sky, SKYPE, and the Internet put us just a few clicks from all our Tweets and Peeps. We can upload photos on FaceBook, a video on YouTube, and update a Fan Page all within seconds of seeing the Eiffel Tower or climbing the Great Wall of China. It’s all about sharing the experience, we think as the SEND button is pressed.

But is all this connectivity a good thing? Back in the days before digital, it could be weeks before the film got developed and you forced friends and family over to suffer through yet another vacation slide show. During that time you hoped the film didn’t get ruined in the heat of your suitcase or the airport x-ray, but it forced us to take things a bit slower. More time was spent in conversation than at a keyboard. A scenic view had to be savored in the mind’s eye, rather than behind a video camera. Getting to know the people surrounding you was more important than sharing the view with those back home.

Has the influx of “connected travel” made you wonder? Are we missing something vital in our manic desire to record every image and share every moment? Should some moments while traveling belong solely to the individual?

I’m torn. I LOVE to take pictures. Pictures help me jog memories months later when my brain might have been filled to capacity while traveling. I enjoy re-living the experience through videos, especially the laughs shared. But I also am aware of so many times my focus is on recording the experience rather than living the experience.

How do you feel? Is “connected travel” a wonderful new friend or moocher of true memories and experience?

We’d be in good company.

Edgar Allen Poe did it. So did Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and John Grisham.

The “pro” list was much larger than the “cons”
•The book could be available within six months instead of two years.
•We’d be responsible for all of the marketing and PR ourselves, but I’d had two other books published by Big Houses (St. Martin’s Press and Putnam) and those things were my responsibility then, too.
•Starting a Small Press would require learning an entirely new skill set, but could open doors for other writers struggling to have their voices heard.

We decided to do it. Create a Small Press, give it a name and an identity, and publish our first book. Details, details, details. Checklists and scribbled notes everywhere.

The book will be out by the end of this month!

It’s been a long road, filled with potholes and gorgeous roadside vistas in equal measure. But opening the package containing the proof copy this week made it all worthwhile. We created a book! It’s not perfect yet, so here come the first round of revisions, but it’s darn close. And did I mention it was beautiful?

For the next few posts, we’d like to share some of the steps we took to make this dream a reality, so others don’t have to “re-invent the wheel” like I felt we did most of the time.

The Birth of a Book (Part 1)

Become a Publisher. Sounds daunting? It’s not. First you’ll need a name. We chose Wander Press because we’re both huge fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and his adage “Not all those who wander are lost.” And with all of the wandering we’ve been doing around the world, it seemed to fit.
Next, we registered the domain name, company, and set up a free blog at Word Press to get started. We were ready to introduce Wander Press to the world!

Choose a printer. As a previously published author with boxes of books stacked in the garage, it was important this time for us to use POD (print-on-demand) technology. We move around a lot, so book storage would be impossible. Also, we needed to find a printer with a great distribution system. Lightning Source was our choice. Their affiliation with Ingram, the global distributor for Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and Baker and Taylor would make getting the books to friends and family around the world easy.

Next post will focus on finding ISBN numbers, Library of Congress Control numbers, and Book Cover software. If you have specific questions about the process, please let us know and we’ll do our best to get you an answer!

It didn’t seem possible Kauai could hold any more gorgeous sights – until we found the Kilauea Point Lighthouse.
As a National Wildlife Refuge, this point of land provides a safe haven for seabirds like the red-footed booby (I REALLY wanted a picture of one of those!), the Wedge-Tailed Shearwater, the Laysan Albatross, and the Magnificent Frigate Bird.

We got a special treat when a fuzzy baby Shearwater woke up in his burrow.

The Kilauea lighthouse was completed in 1913 and its Frensel lens eventually carried a candlepower of over 2,500,000! The lens assembly weighs over four and a half tons and the light produced could be seen as far as 90 miles away.

The views from the cliffs are magnificent! This is a definite “must see” if you visit Kauai.

A big thanks to DeliciousBaby’s Fun Photo Friday!

How can one river be so blue and the other so muddy? What a contrast!

After spending several days rafting on the flashed carmel-colored Colorado River, it was such a surprise to see the brilliant blue of Havasu Canyon appear. This picture of the confluence was taken just before we ended an amazing 6-day raft through the Grand Canyon with Western River Expeditions.

Thanks to Debbie at DeliciousBaby for Fun Photo Friday!

For DeliciousBaby’s Photo Friday, I thought I’d share one we picked to be on the cover of our new book What Boundaries? Live Your Dream!. It was a dreary, rainy day in Brussels when after hours of sightseeing, we stopped for a quick break near the statue of the Manneken Pis. I was standing with my nose pressed on the glass as the girls piled layer upon layer of yummy goo on top of this masterpiece. We ate it right out on the street and the looks of longing from passerby’s were priceless!

With the July 4th holiday upon us, I thought I’d share some tips for taking great fireworks pictures.

1.Steady the camera. Use a tripod with a remote shutter release if possible. Fireworks on a dark night require long exposure times and a steady hand. Trying to hold your camera and a bottle of beer at the same time could result in unnecessary beer spillage.

2.Frame the shot. With fireworks, it’s important to anticipate where the burst will happen. It’s key here to be sure you’re pointing the camera at the fireworks, not the hot bodies in front of you on the grass, no matter what they’re doing.

3.Long shutter speeds. To capture the intensity of a fireworks display, setting the shutter speed to “bulb” or the manual “fireworks” indicator generally gives the best results. Though trying to find the tiny settings on the camera, in the dark and after a few glasses of wine, can take longer than the fireworks themselves.

4.No flashing. The light from a flash only reaches a few feet in front of you and won’t illuminate the sky. Using a flash on a dark night to record fireworks will result in black images and annoyed spectators around you. Offering them a beer usually works to soothe eyes ruined by white flash spots or simply turn off your camera’s flash.

5.And MOST IMPORTANT! Don’t start drinking at noon if the fireworks begin at 8pm. In cases like this, not only have cameras been forgotten entirely, but so have most events of the evening. I speak from experience.

Have a safe and wonderful holiday weekend!

Thanks to Debbie at Delicious Baby for the Fun Photo Friday!

Thought this would be a perfect picture to share with DeliciousBaby’s Fun Photo Friday! Woke up yesterday morning to storm clouds and rain, instantly feeling a bit down – after all, it’s always supposed to be sunny in Hawaii, right? But I’d forgotten the most important thing – without the rain there can never be a rainbow!

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the process of chasing our own rainbows, when if we just stop long enough to look, they appear right in front of us! Have a wonderful weekend and good luck finding those rainbows!

The word of the day was WOW!

WOW! – the view looking into the remains of an extinct volcano from the rim above.
WOW! – the water so clear and blue it felt as though you were swimming in a pristine aquarium.
WOW! – the number and colors of friendly fish (and turtles!) swimming around us.

Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve is one of the most popular snorkeling destinations in all of the Hawaiian Islands and it’s easy to see why. The Preserve is home to over 50 different species of rainbow colored fish with some total fish counts numbering over 400,000 at one time! Visibility is 80 to 100 feet. The floor of the bay is actually the crater of an ancient volcano that flooded when the exterior wall collapsed and the ocean rushed in.

While swimming through the 74 degree (chilly for us!) waters, we were surrounded by so much beauty it was quickly worth the shivers. We were fortunate enough to see a graceful Green Sea Turtle (honu in Hawaiian) swim off for deeper feeding grounds. The state fish of Hawaii, Humuhumu-nukunuku-apaua (a species of triggerfish with a huge name) were out in abundance. We even startled a large moray eel as it was moving from one coral crevice to another (or maybe better said – it startled us!)

We took the advice of the locals and got there early. Though bleary eyed at 7:30 am, we were able to get a good parking spot and have the beach fairly to ourselves. By noon on a Sunday, it’s almost too crowded to move. A great time to pack up the gear and head to Teddy’s Bigger Burgers for a well-deserved lunch – and the BEST burger we’d ever eaten!

Hanauma Bay is open daily in the summer (except Tuesdays) 6 am til 7 pm. As a special treat, on the second Saturday of the month the Preserve is open until 10 pm for NIGHT TIME snorkeling. We’ll have to give that a try and post pictures next month!

Who knew there were so many types of SPAM? Classic, Turkey, Cheese, Bacon, Hickory Smoke, Garlic, Less Sodium, Hot and Spicy, Golden Honey Grail, and Spread – these people take their meat seriously. And who knew the most requested product from the Hawaii Food Bank is a can of SPAM?

Waikiki Beach, Hawaii set the stage for the 7th Annual SPAM JAM Festival to benefit the Hawaii Food Bank. Live music, SPAM merchandise and thousands of Hawaiian-shirt clad revelers made this an event to remember. Who cares that there are 15.2 grams of fat in each slice? It’s a Hawaiian delicacy.

Area restaurants cooked up their best SPAM concoctions for the feast: SPAM Katsu, SPAM Poke, SPAM Ravioli, SPAM with noodles, SPAM Nachos, and my personal favorite – SPAM Burger Babies from Cheeseburger In Paradise, dripping with BBQ sauce and pineapple. YUM!

The best part – aside from the Burger Babies? Over 25,000 people attended and the Hawaii Food Bank was given 3,500 pounds of Hormel product to fill their coffers in addition to the hundreds of cans donated by the festival-goers.

A SPAM-win situation for everyone!