Reflections of My Travel

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Well, since this is a happy vacation, I’m going to refrain on commenting on our night. Let’s just say I know a hotel that will be receiving a letter soon. We got up around 0430 this morning to get to the airport for our flight to the Big Island. We had a short layover on Oahu but they let us stay on the plane so it wasn’t such a pain. Speaking of pain, it wasn’t just a nightmare. The flesh is still well-seared and quite painful. I could not stand to put on a shirt this morning so I wrapped the sarong that Jonna brought back for me when they were here around me. Sidenote: sarongs are a wonderful and magical clothing option – terrific as quick, casual skirts and wonderful for a non-shoulder/neck abrasive top. Clearly, I need a wardrobe full of sarongs. Such a shame that they aren’t as accepted as clothing on the mainland. The flights were short and uneventful. We got to the Big Island, got our van, and started along the southern road. We stopped at the southern-most point in the United States and took some pics of the huge waves. We thought we were going to see a green sand beach there but the maps did not mention that it was a two mile walk to get to it and, unfortunately, we just didn’t have time. Further up the road, we did stop at the black sand beach (where I finally saw some mongooses). It was pretty but really was not much different from the dark granite beaches of Alaska. We didn’t stick around there long. We had a date with Kilauea before sunset. We ended up getting to Volcanos National Park around 1600 and made a stop at the visitor center for a 20 minute film and some hiking maps and information. We then headed straight down toward the coast. When we got to the parking area, we could already see the steam coming from the shoreline a couple of miles away. We donned our rain gear in order to spite the heavy rain that was battering down on us and walked about .5 mile up the road to where a lava flow had blocked the pavement. We then hiked a short distance across the piles of lava to get a decent vantage point. We made it just around dusk – still light enough to get pics of the steam rising from the sea as the hot lava flowed into the water, but just dark enough that we could already see the red glow of the lava. As it got darker, the hillside turned out to be the better show. The lava was glowing nicely up there. And even though we were still a good distance away, we could see the movement of it. Every so often we could catch a good glimpse of the glow at the sea, but for the most part the steam was obscuring it in the dark. What a great experience to see flowing lava. Granted, we could have hiked further and gotten a little bit closer, but I don’t think it would have gotten us National Geographic close and we could see it well enough. Not to mention, this was our first night of really staying awake past dark so it was way past our bedtime. We sat through a few rain squalls, mesmerized by the liquid rock and after a while we turned on our little flashlight and found our way back across the other-earthly landscape to the paved road. We drove back up out of the park to a little campground down the road from the park entrance that had running water (no, I haven’t been able to get that primitive yet, I like a flushing toilet).