Once upon a time we took my nine month old son and his Oma, Mountain Mama's Mama, to Kauai.

And one night we decided to have an adventure.

I had fallen in love with the baskets woven out of palm fronds and I had just bought a book with instructions for said endeavor. My fingers were itching to give it a go. The only major problem we could see, was that we were staying in a well manicured area and all palm trees were on hotel property and in plain sight. Ergo, we needed to go into stealth mode to obtain a palm frond.

During our stealth maneuver we discovered a few things:

• Most promising palm trees in highly manicured areas are well lit even at night
• Palm fronds are remarkably tough. We had to go back to our condo for a knife.
• Palm fronds can be over 15 feet long, which is a little obvious when you're walking down the highway.
• Hiding behind palm fronds is not great camouflage if your mother-in-law bursts into laughter every time she looks at you.

But perhaps the saddest thing we learned:

• Palm fronds from the south side of the island are not ideal for basket weaving.

We ended up going to the north side and buying a basket. The weaver pretended to be impressed by my lopsided attempt...

...But he was truly impressed that the Businessman was able to harvest a palm frond from the Sheridan Poipu.