Aloha Day 9

[ciroccoj]

Hey! I suddenly realized that because of uploading and travel and General Life Stuff, I never did finish my travelogue of Hawai'i. Only got to Day 8.

So, here's Day 9. Or rather, part of Day 9. Day 9 was busy. It was the day that we did the driving tour the concierge at the resort suggested, going up the northern coast of Hawai'i's Big Island and around the tip and then back through the mountains. We saw ruins and monuments and sand and cliffs and greenery and more sand and of course, lots and lots and lots of lava :)




Our first stop was a National Park that held the ruins of a Hawaiian temple, the flats where the nobility spent a lot of their time, and a beautiful beach.


The flat was basically a very nice bay with a river emptying on to it. The kids learned the definition of the word "brackish." When freshwater river joins saltwater sea, the mixing place is brackish.

Home schooling moment: when a brackish river partially evaporates, what's left behind? It's white and crystalline, and...


... tastes like salt! Because it is!


Yes, salt.


A beach! Wonderful, wonderful beach! The kids made themselves a huge hole in the sand, with levees that would've made New Orleans engineers whistle in admiration, then decided that the foamy water inside their hole looked a lot like root beer.


Onwards and upwards (up the coast, that is) to a place where huge breakers and hard lava made for a very poor swimming spot (the signs pleading tourists to not go into the water were redundant but probably necessary for those unable to connect their eyes to their common sense) but a wonderful learning opportunity. The picture above is Chris showing Justin where crabs live.


This is lava, close up. Why not.


These are crab shells. Justin liked them. A lot.

Comments

[leaper182.livejournal.com]

::oohs over the map::

Waimea! badmoon told me about that place! There's supposed to be a waterfall where he and his friends would jump off of into a lake. :)

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

Waimea! [info]badmoon told me about that place! There's supposed to be a waterfall where he and his friends would jump off of into a lake. :)
Hee! Didn't see a lake there, but it's still quite lovely. And cold. It's quite impressive, actually, how sharply the temperature drops from sea level to Waimea. Especially because the slope up is so gentle that you're really not terribly aware that you're going up in altitude, so by the time you get to the top, you think you're just at the top of a small hill. Where it's about 10 degrees colder than the bottom of the small hill.

[a-dawn.livejournal.com]

Heh, I'm just commenting quickly to bite at the quote: X-files!

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

Ding! Yup :)