Tag: Hawaii
ʻŌhiʻa Lehua
Ferns
Beach Sheoak
Gray Whales
This was my first digital camera, and my first real frustrating experience with the delay between pressing the button and actually capturing the image. It’s just not fast enough to capture an image of a whale breaching the surface.
I have lots of pictures of splashes.
This was the best image I got where you can actually see part of a whale!
Hawaiian Silversword
On the upper elevations on Mauna Kea…and just about nowhere else…grows the endangered Silversword . Park rangers actually planted one near the side of the road and put a fence around it so that visitors could see it without hiking through the 11,000-foot-high wilderness.
These are a few shots from the grounds of a hotel in Hawaii that isn’t there anymore.
These are a few shots from the grounds of a hotel in #Hawaii that isn’t there anymore.
The open-air lounge jutted out over #tidePools made of #lavaRock. A bridge labeled Kapu (forbidden) led to the next resort over, which had already been torn down.
It was on the Kona (west) side of the Big Island, and was demolished last year to make way for an educational/cultural center. Since there are several heiau ruins on the property, that’s probably a better use of it.
Two days later:
Realized in all the editing I dropped the *name* of the place. It was the Keauhou Beach Resort. I stayed there for a week in 2005, and took these pictures on an afternoon (or morning) when we weren’t going anywhere else.
Flashback: A tropical stream in Hawaii
Photo taken at: Akaka Falls State Park
Flashback: A #tropical #stream in #Hawaii, somewhere along the trail to the 420-ft Akaka Falls on the Big Island. I’ve been digging out the originals of photos I posted in low resolution back in the day. This seemed like a good one for #EarthDay.
Correction: 440 feet. Not that they’re in this photo anyway.
Knobbly Hill
Along that switchback, we pulled over to the side of the road once because an old lava flow had left a very strange, knobbly texture on the side of the hill.
Eerie: Cave Ghosts, Moon and Fog
On learning that this week’s photo challenge is “eerie,” I started thinking of all the photos in my library that might fit. My mind immediately went to this one, a shot of a nearly-full moon behind ragged clouds taken, appropriately enough, on Halloween last year.
Just about all of my “eerie” shots involve the moon, or clouds/fog, or both. For instance, this view of fog pouring over a hillside at sunset, and the shadows of the trees inside it.
Or this one, a this scanned photo of a lunar eclipse from 1994. I’m fairly certain that the bright splotch is the moon, and the rest, including the ring and the sharper image at upper right, are lens artifacts. It’s been so long that I don’t remember any specifics of taking the photo.
Finally I remembered a series of photos I took at the Thurston Lava Tube in Hawaii, trying to use natural light (with only the cave walls to brace the camera) and picking up ghost images of the other tourists wandering through.
I have some more shots of that cave over at K-Squared Ramblings. That’s also the blog where I’m trying to do NaBloPoMo this month. I started yesterday with a post about yesterday’s shooting at LAX and the spillover it had on the parts of town near the airport: roads closed, constant helicopter noise, sirens, and thousands of stranded travelers leaving the airport on foot, trudging over a mile dragging their luggage in a ragged line. You know, if I’d thought about it and found the right position for a photo, that would have made for a good “eerie” image.
Timing is everything
Two weekends ago, alenxa and I agreed that we would pick a vacation destination within a week, and make arrangements to go somewhere for a week sometime in March. I heard an ad for deals on Hawaii trips through Travelocity, checked out the prices, and was very impressed.
Last Friday we both got our vacation time approved, and I kept meaning to call a travel agent all week. Tonight I just went back onto Travelocity, pulled up the dates we’d picked… and it kept reducing the number of days and giving me prices that were twice what I had seen last time — and for fewer days! Other sites weren’t much help — Expedia couldn’t find any package deals at all unless I shortened the trip!
alenxa figured it out before I did: Spring Break. I guess I’ve just been out of school too long to remember when things hit.
Prices for the following week are back to what I was seeing before. If we can both get our vacation changed tomorrow, we should be set…
(Side note: I find it interesting that Travelocity emphasizes the total cost, while Expedia emphasizes the cost per person. Both numbers are there on each site, but it does make it a bit annoying to comparison shop.)
Giving Blood
In the past several years, I’ve gotten mosquito bites in exactly two places:
1. The Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu. The first day we were in Hawaii, it seemed like I was bitten by every mosquito in the park. The rest of the bugs on the island must have decided I’d been tapped out, because no new bites appeared all week. Of course, the ones I had stayed with me for about a month.
2. Outside alenxa’s parents’ house. Repeatedly.
Maybe it’s just that I don’t spend a lot of time standing around in shorts outside at night. (With three cats in the house, I basically can’t stay inside for more than a few minutes without breaking out the Benadryl.) Or maybe they really do have more mosquitoes there than we do. But lately it seems that every time we go over there, I come back with bug bites. That. Won’t. Stop. Itching.
You know, this might actually be a use for emergency pants. Or just bug repellent.