Welcome Family and Friends!

Aloha and welcome to the first entry of our blog! For those of you who are just learning of our move, we invite you to read on and let us share our ideas with you!

Many of you with whom we have already shared the news have asked us to keep you current with our travels and adventures on our journey moving to the Big Island of Hawaii.  We have heard you and hope that this blog will provide a bird's eye view into our plans and lives along the way. 

"Why Hawaii?" most of you have asked. Well, there are several reasons why, the most obvious reason being the gorgeous weather.  The average temperature on the Big Island, depending on your elevation, ranges between 71 and 80 degrees F, but of course on the beach it tends to be in the upper 80's to lower 90's year round. This is very important to us, not only because we love warm weather, but also because it will enable us to grow our own food year round.  This leads us to the next reason why we are moving to the Big Island. We are both firmly committed to living a sustainable lifestyle, a lifestyle that reduces our use of Mother Earth's natural resources, and growing our own food is a wonderful way to do that!  A few of the other reasons include: the pristine ecology, abundance of organic farms, remoteness, daily rainbows, diverse climates, low population, native Hawaiian spiritual values and ethics, and the overall warmth of the Aloha spirit.

That being said, we want to make a point to say how much we love our New England family and community that we must sadly leave in order to pursue our dream.  You will all be missed.  We just hope that you can find it your big beautiful hearts to let us go with perfect love and perfect trust, knowing that great spirit will provide for all of us in all of our journeys to find and acknowledge our true passions and purposes in this great, wondrous flowing river that we call Life! Blessed Be!

At this point in our journey we are still in the preparations phase. We purchased our plane tickets and made the decision to begin our adventure with a two-week walkabout, touring our beautiful mainland. We reserved a rental car and will be setting out from Boxborough, MA on August 17th heading west to visit Venus' brother, Flo, for a day or so and then onward to the BadLands of South Dakota, Yellowstone National Park and down to the Southwest to explore the Grand Canyon, Chaco Canyon and the Painted Desert.  Although we have a few locations picked out to definitely visit, we are choosing to keep an open and flexible agenda so that we can allow ourselves the freedom to enjoy the journey in whatever way feels right along the path.  At the end of our cross-country excursion we will end up in Las Vegas and be staying at the Luxor hotel, mostly for the shear novelty of it, but also because after camping and traveling for two weeks straight, it will be awfully nice to take warm showers and sleep on a proper bed.

Once we land on the Big Island, we have arranged to rent a furnished apartment in Pahoa, which is on the East side of the island at a low elevation.  From there we will make it our main priority to locate and purchase outright a 1-3 acre property, most likely in the small town of Mountain View, and camp out on it until we have built our simple home by hand.  Yes, that's right, by hand.  The home that we intend on building is a 250-square foot Pallet house designed by the architectural firm, I-Beam Design. On their website, Architects Suzan Wines and Azin Valy state that:

"The inspiration for the Pallet House Project came from the fact that 84% of the world's refugees could be housed with a year's supply of recycled American pallets. With one and a half year of pallet production in the US alone, 33 million refugees can live in a Pallet House." 

In addition, It is also a house that can be built with only a few simple hand tools, so even in our off-the-grid lifestyle, we can still build it.  We also intend to build a small pallet guesthouse and outhouse, as well as a sizable greenhouse.  We will be planting various tropical fruit trees, coffee bushes, and a macadamia nut tree. We hope to grow a little bit of everything so that we have lots to choose from and plenty to share with family, friends, community and most of all, YOU, when you come to visit us. 

The next phase of our Hawaii plan is to integrate with our immediate community and facilitate groups of folks who are interested in learning about the challenges that we all face in our environment and the ways in which we can all implement more sustainable practices in our lives through cooperation, compassion and conscious intentional living with Nature, Spirit, each other and ourselves.

Well, that about sums it up for now.  We invite you all to check in with us here on our blog from time to time.  We will be posting more info and photos towards the end of August as we progress on our journey.  We really love knowing that you are all here with us, reading along as our journey unfolds.

Thank you all for your love and support! 

Mahalo,
Venus & Jack