Pages Tagged “Hawaii 2005”
Blog Posts
- Mauna Kea Star Trails
Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is an incredible long-exposure picture of star trails above Mauna Kea: I think the picture says it all.
- Hawaii: First and Last Views
Here’s our first view of the island of Hawai‘i, as our plane approached on Sunday morning, April 3. Snow-capped Mauna Kea is rising out of the clouds, with Mauna Loa behind it. A week later, we spent Sunday evening waiting for our flight out of Kona Airport. (After a disastrous experience at LAX in which […]
- Hidden Mountain
There was one morning in Hawai‘i that the clouds in Kona cleared and we could actually see something of Hualalai, the volcano that makes up the western side of the island and on whose slopes we were staying. Here’s the view from our hotel room balcony. Usually it looked more like this: Note: Our stay […]
- South Coast and Black Sand
Flashback to April and Hawaii. On the day we drove to Kilauea we stopped at various places along the way. And since it’s a nearly-100-mile drive from Kailua, there was a lot to see. We never made it down to South Point (the southernmost tip of the island), partly because of time and partly because—believe […]
- Under the Sea (Kailua Edition)
On the same day as our whale-watching cruise (April 6), we took a submarine tour of Kailua Bay from Atlantis Adventures. The tour started at the Kailua pier, where a boat ferried us out to the submarine in the middle of the bay. The sub itself went down to around 80-90 feet by the end […]
- Whale Watch Hawaii
One of the first tours we signed up for on Hawaii was a whale watching tour. We figured even if we didn’t see any whales, we’d still have spent a couple of hours on a sailboat. It was April, near the end of the season, and we booked a tour through Red Sail (via Travelocity) […]
- Kilauea, Craters, and Hot, Hot Lava
Kilauea is often called the world’s most active volcano. It’s been erupting continuously since 1983 at vents several miles away from the caldera. The eruptions are still inside Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, but the lava hasn’t stuck to the boundaries as it flows to the sea. So late on an April afternoon, we started driving […]
- Thurston Lava Tube (Nāhuku)
Let’s see, when we left off, we had nearly completed a circuit around the Kilauea caldera. Before driving down Chain of Craters road to the coast, we stopped at the Thurston Lava Tube. Update (2021): The park is now emphasizing the Hawaiian name for the cave, Nāhuku, but at the time we visited in 2005, […]
- Familiar Footfall
Years ago, I put the Niven/Pournelle novel Footfall in my to-read box. I finally started reading it today. After a prologue that takes place mostly at the press conference for the 1980 Voyager 1 encounter with Saturn, the first chapter opens (years later) with a drive up Hawaii’s Kona coast and inland to the observatories […]
- A Visit to Kilauea
Picking up the oft-delayed vacation photos series, here’s the first half of our trip out to Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park and the volcano Kilauea. Kilauea is often referred to as the most active volcano in the world. To give you an idea why, its latest eruption started in 1983… and is still going! We got […]
- Lava Graffiti
Amid the old lava flows on the west coast of Hawai‘i, locals have a tradition of arranging coral on the jumbled rocks to create temporary graffiti. It tends to be “friendly” graffiti, more like carving one’s initials in a tree than tagging a freeway wall with spray paint. We drove past a beautifully drawn whale […]
- Beware of Invisible Cows
The visitor center for the Mauna Kea observatories has a sign that says Beware of Invisible Cows. It actually makes sense in context.
- The Keauhou Beach Resort
When we arrived in Hawaii, I posted this photo taken from our hotel room balcony: What I didn’t mention was that that shot was carefully cropped. The view really looked like this: Well, hey, we got the cheap rooms, so you kind of expect that. Still, there was a lot to see right on the […]
- Mauna Kea
And now for something completely different: Hawaiian snow. On our second-to-last day in Hawaii, we took a tour up to the summit of Mauna Kea, the highest mountain in the state at 13,796 feet. And even in early April, they still had snow at the summit. We caught a somewhat hazy view of it from […]
- Hawaii’s East Coast
We didn’t get to see much of the Hilo side of the island. Our last day there, we checked out of the hotel and just started driving, figuring we’d just see how far we could get before turning back to make our flight. We did actually make it to Hilo itself—just in time to turn […]
- Up the coast to Kohala
It’s taking me longer than I thought to post all these Hawaii photos. North of Kona there are miles of old lava flows, the most recent of which were in 1801 (from Hualalai, the volcano above Kailua) and 1859 (from Mauna Loa, the second-higest peak on the island). Because the island is right in the […]
- Nene Xing
The Nene (roughly nay-nay), a.k.a. the Hawaiian Goose, is Hawaii’s state bird. It’s also endangered. There’s supposed to be a (comparatively) large population in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, but we didn’t see a single one all week. All we saw were a zillion of these signs warning us to avoid hitting them. Maybe it was […]
- Top Three Hawaiian Words
When we visited Oahu two years ago, we noticed that aloha was everywhere, and meant everything. Aside from hello and goodbye, it seemed to represent an easy-going, positive attitude. There were signs all over the place saying things like “Drive with aloha.” Then there was mahalo, Hawaiian for “thank you,” which is used everywhere in […]
- Exploring Kona
We spent a lot of time exploring the Kona coast, where towns manage to be both beach towns and mountain towns at the same time. It’s simplest to think of the island as one huge mountain (though there are really four mountains on the island, with a fifth, Kilauea, working its way up). The land […]
- Donkey Xing
Driving through the lava fields of North Kona, you’ll see signs like these: After coffee companies stopped using donkeys for transportation, they turned them loose, and a herd of wild donkeys roamed the fields. They apparently picked up the nickname “Kona nightingales” from their, uh, “singing.” They’ve since been moved up to greener—and less traveled— […]
- Hawaii in a nutshell
So… a week in Hawaii. I guess the main thing to remember is that it is the “big island.” It can take 2½–3 hours to get from one side of the island to the other, and that’s without stopping to see anything along the way. We stayed in Kailua-Kona, and ended up spending most of […]
- Overheard in a Kona cafe
Diner: I was here thirty years ago and had the best beer I’ve ever tasted, anywhere in the world. <pause> This is the worst. Waiter: I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do anything about that. It’s Budweiser.
- Back from Hawaii
Seven days on “the big island” (a.k.a. Hawai‘i) just aren’t enough. Our flight came in at about 5:30 this morning, and I don’t think either of us got more than a few minutes of sleep, so we’ve been catching up during the day. We’ll both be posting comments and photos over the next couple of […]
- Iconography
To claim your complementary in-flight woman, press here. No thanks, I don’t want one.
- United at last!
- Hotel View
It was a long day, and we stood in way too many lines, but we’ve made it to Hawaii! (Unfortunately, the room’s “data port” is just an easily-accessible phone port. Back to dial-up…)