We’ve been home a few days now, and I mostly know what time it is. It’s hard getting back into the rhythm of work, though – I must still have the spirit of the islands in me. I finally posted the last batch of photos, mostly of the big island around Hilo.
I also spent several hours monkeying around with Snapfish, the online photo service started by Hewlett-Packard. I can now safely say with authority that Flickr rules. Snapfish is slow, unwieldy, and doesn’t let you do any of the cool things like tagging and blogging that Flickr does. It is clearly NOT about social networking. After my experiences of the past two days, it appears to me that Snapfish is about buying prints. Several of the folks at my niece’s wedding had Snapfish accounts (let me guess – they all had HP digital cameras, perhaps?) so she decided that it would be easier for us all to use one service, hence my having to deal with Snapfish’s sucky interface. Oh well. My task is finished so I’m done with Snapfish.
Okay, back to vacation tales:
When last we left our intrepid adventurers, we were on Hilo and I was enviously photographing an empty iPhone box (in retrospect, that seems really, really pathetic). What we actually did that day was visit Volcanoes National Park, where we watched the lava NOT flow. That’s right, this past Father’s Day, for reasons known best to the Kilauea volcano, all lava abruptly stopped flowing after over twenty years of nonstop activity. What are the odds of that? We saw a lot of steam vents, didn’t have to worry at all about vog (all of the locals remarked on how clear the air was), hiked the Kilauea Iki Trail, and drove around Crater Rim Road. It’s eerie there, like walking on the moon. There was a general sense of a collective holding of breath – absolutely everyone believed that the complete cessation of all lava activity means that a big eruption is imminent. Chuck was ready to stay on if the eruption occurred before we left, but no such luck. My sister, with her broken wrist, had no such feelings. She couldn’t wait to get home. We took to calling her “The Little Trooper” after someone called her that in reference to her plugging on with the trip even after being injured. She called herself that as well, in a rather pathetic voice that begged you to feel sorry for her and pat her on the head (we knew better than to pat her on the broken wrist – that would have instantly turned her from the little trooper into the violently angry son of a gun).
We also got in another day of snorkeling and saw an ancient sea turtle and lots of sergeant major fish (we saw some other fish as well, but sergeant majors are the only ones I know by name and that makes me sound like I actually know something about fish).
The day we left we drove around the south side of the island, and stopped at Punalu’u, a black sand beach. These beaches are very ephemeral as they are made of finely crushed volcanic rock and erode very quickly. Sea turtles love to sun themselves here, and we saw five or six swimming and hanging out on the rocks and in the sand. Very cool! We also drove down Napo’opo’o Road to Kealakekua Bay where we saw the Captain Cook Memorial, a white obelisk that sits on a spit of land that is the only bit of Hawaiian soil still held by the British. The monument was built in 1874 and stands near the spot where he was killed in February 1779 by a bunch of ticked off Hawaiians (they felt really bad about it afterwards, though).
Our flight home was uneventful (and sadly NOT in first class). No luggage was lost, and all of the planes were on time. We did go to the Apple Store in Honolulu on a fruitless quest for an iPhone, but alas they were sold out. My very own Jesus phone is on the way, with an expected shipping date of no later than July 13. I’m keeping busy buying accessories for it.