Apr 2025 – Nov 2025

Here’s how this happened. Drew calls Nicholas on a Wednesday night. “Hey, I’m going to be stuck at a resort in Kauai for a few days with an extra bed. Want to come hang out?” When? “Friday.” Like, the day after tomorrow Friday? “Yeah.”

So Nicholas booked last-minute tickets to Hawaii. Obviously I was going. Bud trip means all buds. That’s not even a question.

For context, Drew is a pilot. Sometimes he ends up at a hotel for a few days between flights. This time, the hotel happened to be in Kauai. So basically, Drew got a free resort vacation and Nicholas got a free resort room, and I got shoved in a carry-on. Everybody wins.

We checked into the Sheraton Kauai Coconut Beach Resort, and I immediately claimed my territory. Balcony with an ocean view. Hammock on the lawn. The bed, obviously.

The front desk gave Nicholas a shell lei. I immediately took it, because it was obviously meant for me and the staff just made a mistake. Rude. Nicholas knows how things work around here. I wore it the entire trip. It really tied the whole look together.

The plan for the trip was simple: wake up, go explore Kauai, come back to the resort, and play video games on laptops until way too late. The kind of trip that only happens when it’s just the buds.

Day Two: Going West

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We started the morning with a waterfall, because apparently that’s what you do in Kauai.

Then we ran into the locals.

Kauai is famous for its feral chickens. They’re everywhere. Just strutting around like they own the place. Roosters crowing at 4 AM. Hens blocking parking lots. Total chaos. Honestly, I respect the energy. These chickens answer to nobody. They’ve been free-range since Hurricane Iniki blew open all the coops in 1992 and they just… never went back. Thirty years of unsupervised chicken freedom. Living the dream.

We drove south along the coast and found some seriously dramatic cliffs.

That’s Drew on the right. He doesn’t like being in photos much, which is why this is basically the only proof he was on this trip. Three buds went to Hawaii. One of them is a ghost.

Then we headed up to Waimea Canyon, which they call the Grand Canyon of the Pacific. It’s not as big as the actual Grand Canyon, but it makes up for it by being green instead of brown. And you don’t have to drive to Arizona.

Day Three: Going North

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Last day, so we went the other direction. North shore.

First stop was Kilauea Lighthouse. Nicholas took this one specifically for his mom, because she loves lighthouses. I’m just here for the photo op.

Then we hiked the Okolehao Trail above Hanalei, which goes straight up a ridge and gives you this view:

The whole trip was three days. Drew had a free room. Nicholas had no plans. I had a shell lei and an ocean view. We hiked, we explored, we played video games until an unreasonable hour every night, and then Drew had to go fly a plane somewhere and we had to go home.

Not a bad way to spend a long weekend. More bud trips like this, please.

Every year the question is the same. “What should we be for Halloween?”

Every year Nicholas has the answer.

This year’s answer: Expedition 33.

For those not living their best gaming life, Expedition 33 is a gorgeous RPG where a team of misfits sets out on an impossible mission across a painted continent. Nicholas would be Gustave, the expedition leader. Pokin would be Lune, the elegant sharpshooter. And me?

Esquie.

The most powerful being in the world. Can soar through the heavens. Can dive beneath the sea. Beloved by children everywhere. Also, canonically lazy.

I have never felt so seen by a video game character. Except that last part.

Now, Pokin doesn’t do simple. She found actual sewing patterns online with instructions for crafting the Expedition 33 shoulder patches from scratch. We’re talking piping, lining, and real gold leaf patterning. Hand-applied. On black fabric. Like we’re tailors in 18th-century France.

Nicholas had to cut out the intricate designs on the Cricut.

Then came the piping. Gold fabric pinned to black, every edge precise.

Then the gold leaf. By hand. Press, peel, pray.

The workspace looked like a craft store exploded in the living room. Sewing machine, spools of metallic thread, gold fragments everywhere. Nicholas was finding gold flakes in his hair for a week.

But the results? Not too shabby at all.

The costumes actually looked incredible. The gold leaf shoulder patches, the dark jackets, the whole vibe. Nicholas’s Gustave coat with the purple vest underneath was especially good. Pokin’s Lune outfit with the white ruffled shirt and face markings? She went all in.

And then there was me.

Custom Expedition 33 headband patch, handmade by Nicholas himself. I looked magnificent.

We hosted the party at Bear Falls Resort, naturally. My bud’s mom flew down from Oregon for it. She came as a flamingo because she loves flamingos. I respect a woman who knows her brand.

Outside, Pokin had Nicholas set up this giant inflatable Halloween tree in the yard. It has a screaming face, clawed branches, and glowing orange eyes. It looks like something that would eat you in The Witcher.

I love it.

Pokin and PoOn spent days prepping food for the party, because of course they did. Hand-drawn ghost cookies. Cakes that had no business looking that good at a Halloween party. And the highlight: cake pops. Pumpkins, zombies, and mummies, all hand-decorated. The girls baked them, Nicholas helped with the dipping and decorating.

Those mummy ones with the googly eyes? Perfect. The zombie ones were green and unsettling in the best way. And the pumpkin ones had little pretzel stems, which is the kind of detail that makes you realize these people take dessert as seriously as I do.

Not a bad Halloween at all.

Esquie out.

Bruce had been working out of the home office for weeks, and we’d already dragged him to Bryce Canyon and Zion. But we weren’t done with him yet. Nicholas, Pokin, and Bruce loaded up the car and headed west toward the Sierra Nevada.

The destination: Big Pine Lakes, a chain of turquoise glacial lakes tucked into a granite amphitheater beneath Temple Crag. The plan: start early, hike the full loop to all the lakes, come home heroes. The reality: slightly different.

4 AM Start

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The trail was supposed to be hot, so they started before dawn. Which meant it was actually cold. The kind of cold where you question why you agreed to this while stumbling up a trail in the dark.

But then the Sierra did its thing.

The alpenglow on the high Sierra is something else. The peaks go from gray to orange to gold while you’re still hiking in shade. It’s like the mountains are showing off.

The Trail

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The Big Pine Lakes trail climbs about 2,000 feet over four and a half miles to the first lake, then keeps going through a chain of seven lakes. The full loop is somewhere around 15 miles. They were going to do all of it.

I rode in Nicholas’s pack. Anti-bath technology deployed. Hoodie up.

The trail starts in sagebrush and pine, crosses a creek with some spectacular dead standing trees, and then gets into serious granite switchback territory.

The Lakes

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And then you see the water.

The Big Pine Lakes are turquoise. Not blue, not green. Turquoise. The color comes from rock flour, basically pulverized granite dust ground up by what’s left of the Palisade Glacier and suspended in the water. It looks fake. It looks like someone poured food coloring into a mountain.

Temple Crag dominates the whole basin. A massive wall of vertical granite with buttresses and couloirs that looks like it belongs in a fantasy game, not California. I’ve seen a lot of mountains on this blog. This one is up there.

Bruce found a perfectly round boulder perched on a granite slab and decided it needed a photo.

I got my own photo series at the lake, because priorities.

The Early Exit

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The plan was to do the full loop, hitting all seven lakes. They made it to a few and then took an early loop back. Smart call. Nicholas and Pokin, who hike regularly, were going strong. Bruce is a gym guy. Very fit, very strong, could probably carry me and Nicholas up a flight of stairs without breathing hard. But gym fit and trail fit are different animals. Long-distance hiking at altitude doesn’t care how much you can bench press. His knees were done.

No shame in that. The trail gained 2,000 feet and the altitude hits different when you’re from sea level in Colombia. They still covered serious ground, saw the best of the lakes, and got to stare at Temple Crag for a few hours. That’s a win.

The Drive Home

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Eventually Bruce headed back to Colombia with busted knees and a phone full of photos. A summer of Bryce Canyon, Zion twice, and the Sierra Nevada. Not bad for a work visit.

Next time we’re doing the full loop.

Day two of the Bruce visit. After Bryce (where I was cruelly left behind), we headed back to Zion. Our usual routine: bike the canyon, hike the Narrows, stay at the Cliffrose.

This time, I came along.

The Cliffrose is our spot in Springdale. It’s right at the entrance to Zion, the grounds back up to the canyon walls, and the views from the patio are the kind of thing that makes you briefly forget you’re paying lodge prices.

Chestnut came too. He was very excited. He’s always very excited.

Biking the Canyon

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First up: biking the Zion Canyon Scenic Drive. Cars aren’t allowed past a certain point in the park, so it’s either the shuttle or a bike. We bike. It’s better.

The Narrows (Again)

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Then the main event. The Narrows. We were just here with Pokong a few weeks ago, but Zion’s like that. You come back.

Big milestone: this was the first time Nicholas bought his own water shoes instead of renting. Commitment.

Deeper in, the canyon walls close and the light gets interesting. Some of the side slots are barely wide enough for one person.

The Deer

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Back at the Cliffrose that evening, we had visitors.

The deer at the Cliffrose have zero fear. They walk right up to the rooms, graze on the lawn, bring their fawns. They’ve figured out that lodge guests are harmless and usually have cameras.

Dinner and Stars

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Dinner was in Springdale. Good food, better backdrop.

And then the sky did its thing. Perfect clear night, Milky Way fully visible. Nicholas, Bruce, and Pokin stayed up experimenting with phone cameras, wishing they’d brought the real ones.

Zion in August. Biking, hiking, deer on the lawn, stars over the canyon. Not a bad day in bear territory.

We’d barely recovered from Pokong’s visit when the next houseguest arrived. Bruce, one of Nicholas’s engineers from Colombia, came up to spend the summer working out of the home office. Nicholas figured if the team had a tight deadline, they might as well grind it out together. In person. In Las Vegas. In August.

And if you’re going to have a coworker from Colombia staying at your house, you take him to Bryce Canyon. You take Bruce to Bryce. It’s right there. You have to.

The crew was Nicholas, Pokin, Bruce, Po On, and Eric. They picked a quieter loop trail so they wouldn’t be fighting crowds the whole way. Smart.

I was not invited on this hike.

I’m choosing to believe this was for my own protection. The sun. The elevation. My delicate constitution. Definitely not an oversight.

The hoodoos at Bryce are those tall, skinny rock spires that look like someone stacked a city out of orange sandstone and forgot to add streets. Thousands of them, packed into an amphitheater, glowing different colors depending on where the sun hits.

They started on the Fairyland Trail, which despite the name has no fairies and no bears. Disappointing on both counts.

The trail drops down into the canyon and winds through the hoodoos. Hardly anyone else on it.

The scenery at Bryce just keeps going. Every direction, more hoodoos, more layers, more orange. It’s the kind of place where you stop taking photos because you realize every single one looks the same and also incredible.

There are some natural arches along the way that frame the canyon like windows.

And then there are the trees. The pines at Bryce hang on to the canyon rim with exposed roots gripping bare rock like they’re holding on for dear life. Which they are. The ground is literally eroding out from under them.

Once you’re down in the canyon among the hoodoos, the scale hits different. They tower over you. The colors shift from orange to pink to white depending on the layer. It looks like walking through a very old, very tall, very orange city that nobody built.

And of course, the jump photos. You can’t go to a national park without jump photos. It’s a rule.

Bryce Canyon. No crowds, no bears, no problems. Bruce got to see something that doesn’t exist in Colombia. Nicholas got to take Bruce to Bryce, which I suspect was the real reason for this entire trip.

Next time, they’re bringing me.

When we were last in Hong Kong, Nicholas asked Pokin’s brother Pokong why he’d never come to visit.

Then he told him to come.

Then he told him to come on the most American day possible.

Fourth of July.

So Pokong finally came to America. He had exactly two requests:

1. Drive a Cybertruck.
2. Shoot guns.

Simple enough. But Nicholas doesn’t do simple. Nicholas does “we have a week and I have a plan.”

The Narrows

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First stop: Zion National Park.

If you’re going to show someone America, you don’t start with strip malls and fast food. You start with a canyon so deep it makes you feel like a speck. PoOn and Eric came along too, because Pokin’s family travels in packs.

We stopped at Valley of Fire on the way out. Red rocks, blue sky, 110 degrees. Classic Nevada welcome. Then we drove to Springdale to set up camp near Zion.

Next morning, everyone geared up. Rented the canyoneering boots. Rented the walking sticks. The Narrows requires you to literally walk through a river inside a canyon, and the rental shop knows it.

And then we went in.

The Narrows is one of those hikes where the trail IS the river. You’re wading through the Virgin River with canyon walls towering on either side. It starts ankle deep. It does not stay ankle deep.

At first everyone hiked together. Then Nicholas and Eric took off, leaving the Yeung siblings to go at their own pace. As one does.

Deeper in, the canyon gets serious. The walls close in, the light gets weird, and you start to understand why people fly across the world to walk through a river.

We were not the only ones with this idea.

The group also went biking through the park, because apparently walking through a river for hours wasn’t enough exercise.

On the way out, we stopped at Checkerboard Mesa.

Ghost Town, Dinosaurs, and a Cave

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The next day, everyone was trying to figure out what to do. Nicholas didn’t like the plans. So Nicholas took over.

He found a ghost town. An actual abandoned pioneer settlement with a schoolhouse and log cabins and everything. Pokong seemed cautiously impressed, in the way that someone from Shenzhen looks at a 150-year-old wooden building and thinks “we’d have replaced this by now.”

Then we saw dinosaur tracks. Real ones. In the ground. Labeled and everything.

And then, because the day wasn’t full enough, Nicholas found a cave.

The desert out here does not mess around.

The American Experience

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Pokong did get his two requests. Nicholas took him shooting. From what I heard, the guns scared the absolute bejesus out of him. Nobody got hurt, which is apparently the bar for a successful shooting range visit.

The Cybertruck driving happened too. PoOn came out for that. There was a photoshoot. I’m told it was very cool. I wouldn’t know, because nobody brought me.

But the real American experience? That’s the food.

Pokong came to America for a Cybertruck and some guns. He got a canyon, a river, a ghost town, dinosaur bones, a cave, a bear, tacos, and the realization that Nicholas does not know how to plan a simple week.

I think that’s a win.

It started benign enough.

Sesame Street did a collaboration with Gotham Greens. They put Sesame Street characters on salad packaging. Salad. The healthy thing. Leaves. You know.

Pokin thought it was cute and picked up the Cookie Monster one. Good choice. Responsible. A woman training for Everest Base Camp, buying lettuce. Her friends would be proud.

The lettuce lived in the fridge for about a week.

And for about a week, every time she opened the fridge, Cookie Monster stared back at her. Cookie Monster. On lettuce. The irony of putting the cookie guy on salad is not lost on me, a bear who understands that dessert is the superior meal category.

After seven days of psychological warfare from a plastic container, Pokin cracked.

She did not buy more salad.

Four full-sized Crumbl cookies. Not small ones. Not the minis. The big ones.

She ate them for dinner.

That was dinner. The whole dinner. Four cookies from a pink box on the kitchen counter where the salad used to be. Cookie Monster won.

Her friend Davey called it rock bottom. Chestnut called it “concerning.” I call it the most relatable thing Pokin has done all year.

The salad, for what it’s worth, did eventually get eaten. But not that night. That night belonged to the cookies.

I love CES. I also don’t love CES. Because Pokin goes to CES, gets excited about things, and then those things show up at the house.

Two things showed up this week.

Thing One: The Robot

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The Roborock Saros Z70. A robot vacuum with a retractable arm. An actual mechanical arm that reaches out, grabs objects off the floor, and moves them. Pokin saw this at CES and had to have one.

Nicholas was less thrilled. “This thing is stupid,” he said, which is what he says about every gadget right before it permanently lives in the house.

The arm picks up socks, shoes, small objects. Anything under 300 grams. It relocates them out of its cleaning path with the confidence of something that has never once questioned whether it should be doing this.

Thing Two: The StairMaster

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The same week, a StairMaster arrived. A full commercial-grade stair climber. For EBC training.

The logistics were a nightmare. Multiple movers turned down the job. Someone finally agreed, and they wrestled it into the bedroom. It barely fits. It nearly touches the ceiling. It weighs roughly 600 pounds.

It’s never leaving that room.

The Incident

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The StairMaster was a little wobbly on the tile, so Nicholas temporarily stuck a rag under one of the legs to stabilize it.

You can probably see where this is going.

The Roborock found the rag.

It decided the rag needed to be moved. It extended its arm, grabbed the rag, and pulled. The StairMaster did not move. The Roborock did not care. It locked in. Lifted itself off the ground. Pulled harder. The arm was fully committed to removing this rag from under a 600-pound machine that was not going anywhere.

Nicholas had to physically pry the robot away. It did not want to let go.

This was not an isolated incident. The robot also decided to rearrange shoes into what I can only describe as a fairy ring. In the process, it kept jamming its own arm into furniture above it, because the arm extends upward and the robot has no concept of overhead clearance.

Pokin loves it. Nicholas wants to put it in a closet. I’m staying on the desk where it can’t reach me.

Sigh.

This started in Korea.

In Seoul, our friend’s wife wanted a Labubu. If you don’t know what a Labubu is, congratulations, you have a normal life. For the rest of us: it’s a fuzzy vinyl-faced monster made by Pop Mart, the blind box company that has taken over every mall in Asia. You buy a sealed box, you don’t know which character you’ll get, and apparently this is exciting enough to create lines around the block.

We hit Pop Mart stores in Seoul looking for one. Every single time: sold out. The shelves had plenty of other characters nobody wanted, but the Labubus? Gone. Always gone. The staff would just shrug. “Very popular.”

We gave up in Korea. The Labubus won that round.

Then we went to Hong Kong.

Pokin’s cousins in Hong Kong, bless them, had been hunting online. They managed to order a few through HKTVmall, the local e-commerce platform, where Labubus sell out within minutes of restocking. They secured some for our friend’s wife, plus extras.

And one for Nicholas.

Nicholas did not need a Labubu.

Three boxes showed up. “Exciting Macaron” series. The Monsters. Vinyl Face. BOOM. Every word on the box is trying harder than the last.

Nicholas opened his and pulled out a fuzzy grey monster with a vinyl face and dead eyes. He clipped it to his bag immediately. No hesitation. No shame.

So to recap: we spent two days in Korea hunting these things across multiple Pop Mart stores, failed completely, flew to Hong Kong, and Pokin’s cousins just ordered them online like normal people.

The friend got her Labubu. Nicholas got a Labubu he didn’t ask for. And somewhere in all of this, a bear and a freshly vended horse watched from the sidelines, wondering what happened to standards.

After Korea, we flew to Hong Kong to visit Pokin’s family. This is what we do. Every year or so, Pokin’s dad and her brother Pokong come up from Shenzhen, and we all meet in Hong Kong for a few days of food, family, and tradition. We always stay at the Conrad.

The trip had a few objectives. See family. Eat everything. And take care of some important business with the ancestors.

Paying Respects

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Every visit, we go to Cape Collinson to pay respects to Pokin’s relatives. This time, we went a little extra.

In Chinese tradition, you burn paper offerings so your ancestors can use them in the afterlife. Money, houses, clothes, whatever you think they’d appreciate. The tradition has, shall we say, modernized.

Nicholas spotted a paper Tesla at the vendor and insisted. It was for Pokin’s uncle, a man who had a tough life. He was found abandoned in a bathroom as a baby, taken in by Pokin’s grandfather and raised as family. He worked as an electrician his whole life, never had much, but he made sure his niece Shirley could get through school and become a nurse. He gave what he had.

So we got him a Tesla.

The paper model came with a miniature Supercharger station. It also came with a paper gas pump, which is funny because the whole point of a Tesla is that it doesn’t need one. Details.

Pokin’s dad led the ceremony at Cape Collinson, on the eastern tip of Hong Kong Island. The joss paper, the Tesla, the incense, everything placed at the family niche on the hillside, with the cemetery stretching out below and Hong Kong’s green mountains beyond.

The Pig Year Problem

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We also went to Wong Tai Sin Temple, one of the most famous temples in Hong Kong, because this was an important year for Nicholas.

In Chinese astrology, certain zodiac signs clash with the ruling animal of the year. 2025 is the Year of the Snake, and the Pig is one of the signs that conflicts with it. This is called fan tai sui (犯太歲), and it means your year is going to be rough unless you go to the temple and sort it out. Nicholas is a Pig. So this was his year to pay the visit.

The fortune teller at Wong Tai Sin is smart about this. Every year, a different set of zodiac signs are in conflict, which means every year somebody in the family has to come back. Good business model.

We lit incense, made offerings, and asked for good luck. Given that Nicholas had already wiped out on a bunny slope and sliced his knee open a few weeks earlier, the Pig needed all the help he could get.

Pokin’s dad had a different take. He said Nicholas’s accident was actually a good thing. The injury “cut off his bad luck at the knee.” Got the bad stuff out of the way early. That’s one way to look at a ski patrol toboggan ride.

Food (Obviously)

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Pokin’s dad took us to his favorite hot pot place. Lau Haa, a restaurant that still looks like the Hong Kong he grew up in. Neon signs, red tiles, old-school everything. He reminisced about the city of his childhood while we dunked things in boiling broth.

Another night, dinner at Uncle Adolf’s place. He’s one of Pokin’s dad’s oldest friends and the man who gave Pokin her first real job at Campbell Soup back in the day. Good food, good stories, the kind of evening where the adults talk for three hours and nobody checks the time.

And of course, dim sum. A proper Hong Kong dim sum spread with the whole family around a lazy Susan, arguing over who gets the last har gow.

The Horse

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Now for the important part.

Every trip to Hong Kong, we go to the Jockey Club. This is tradition. Years ago, Pokin’s dad won enough money betting on horses to put a down payment on her parents’ first house. They couldn’t have afforded to buy one otherwise, and that bet kickstarted everything. So we always go back. For luck.

The Hong Kong Jockey Club in Central is the kind of place where horse racing is taken very seriously. Members’ lounges, dark wood paneling, the smell of old money and new odds.

And in the stairwell, a vending machine.

Pokin spotted it first. The HKJC Priority vending machine, tucked into a stairwell, stocked with official Jockey Club merchandise. Caps, tins, memorabilia. And plush horses. Little brown racing horses with bridles, wearing the Jockey Club colors.

Pokin used to have stuffed horses when she was younger. Princess and PB&J. She wanted one.

“No, let me,” insisted her dad.

“Let him,” insisted Nicholas.

So Pokin’s dad vended a racing horse from the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

There he was. A small brown horse with a black bridle, standing on the counter, looking earnest and slightly confused about his new situation. The kind of face that says “I will try very hard at whatever you need.”

“I think his name should be Chestnut,” said Nicholas. After Pokin’s favorite cake.

“Sounds about right,” said Pokin.

And that’s how Chestnut came to live with us. A Hong Kong Jockey Club horse, vended from a machine in the members’ lounge, paid for by Pokin’s dad, named after a cake.

He’s a hard-working, earnest, overwhelmingly optimistic horse who tries incredibly hard to be helpful. He’s so wholesome I can’t be mad at him. Plus he’s a gift from Pokin’s dad. That counts for something.

It’s a little ridiculous how upbeat he is, though. Just relentlessly positive. Like a motivational poster that follows you around the house.

Welcome to the crew, Chestnut. Try to keep up.