Fast forward through various adventures in American Samoa to say that we sailed through a moonlit night to arrive in Samoa (formerly known as Western Samoa) and went through check-in and clean-up yesterday (OK, the harbor in Pago Pago led all sorts of life to grow all sorts of places on the boat.) Today we got up at dusk and went to the (I am stumped to say anything but) bustling markets where Steve and I were invited to drink kava with a man sitting at an empty large table next to men avidly playing dominos and checkers and then shopped buying roasted breadfruit and taro leaf with coconut and onion and while I was talking to a woman who sold shell jewelry and mangos who told me that the table with the kava was where all the island matai (chiefs) came on Saturday morning I noticed Steve had been invited to sit down again and was deep into sports and politics with the chiefs and a university professor but eventually we drew away and bought Nolan a spare axe handle made of wood from the pau tree (he has an axe for Midland) and took off for a visit to the Catholic cathedral with beautifully painted windows and grabbed a fruit smoothie at Aggie Grey's and then a bus to ride up the central island road to visit Robert Louis Stevenson's home and grave and on the bus Steve asked a man how many children he had and he gave the number and mentioned that his daughter was Ele Opeloge, Samoa's golden girl weight lifter who according to the paper today "is known to suffer from stage fright at international events where she is not surrounded by family and other supporters" and who placed fourth, and eventually we hiked up the hill to the grave, chatting away extensively with a young man named Chase from Seattle on his way to Cambodia though at the grave overlooking the coast was a mixed crowd of local university faculty and singing teens and older men in running clothes and a sailing family who have become the legal guardians of an 11 y/o boy from Kiribati but by the time we descended the muddy trail spotting birds with primary colored feathers I realized that if I asked Chase if he had gone to Montlake Elementary School he probably knew our friends Lynn and Tom and their kids and sure enough he did and was on his way to visit them so we gave him a boat card with a message for them and then walked around the outside of Stevenson's house which had closed earlier than we expected and declined the guard's offer to look in the windows for a cut-rate and hitched back to town and visited with fellows at the dock and chewed over boat technical problems. The night is young.