So we have been lucky enough to have been able to take a vacation every year for the past ten years. I have been trying to think of a place to go this year, but not really sure where. The Broncos play in Green Bay next season, so we might try and get tickets, and go on a road trip to Green Bay, and then down to Ohio and visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I have always wanted to see Lambeau Field because of all the history there. If they play in December I might not want to go though. That would be a lot of driving on crappy roads.

I don’t know if that would count as our vacation though. I kind of want to go some place this summer. One of my Twitter friends mentioned that she only needs to visit ten states to have visited them all. So I though I would check to see what states I haven’t visited yet.

visited 32 states (64%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

I still have 18 more to go. Maybe it’s time to visit the New England states, or maybe Vegas and the Grand Canyon? Something tells me no vacation is ever going to match Hawaii though.

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For those of you sick of my vacation posts, this is the last one.  Day eight was our last full day in Hawaii. 

We started it off by taking a helicopter ride.  I wasn’t sure what to expect from the ride.  I’m not a big fan of flying, but surprisingly it wasn’t really scary at all.  The take off and landings in planes is what I really hate.  In a helicopter, take offs and landings are nice and smooth.  It was only a 50 minute ride, but we got some nice views of a couple waterfalls, and got an even closer look Mount Kilauea.  We flew right around the active volcano.  We then went on a search for some open lava.  The flows are always changing, and mostly underground when we were there.  We did see a couple open windows where you could see the lava flowing.  It was pretty damn cool to see.

That afternoon we went to Mauna Kea.  Mauna Kea is the highest point in Hawaii, and one of the best spots in the word to observe space, because it’s above 40% of Earth’s atmosphere, and 90% of the water vapor.  We met our tour at the base.  It was nice to take the tour up because the ride was a little hairy.  About half way up we passed through the clouds.  We saw the only snow removal equipment in Hawaii up there, but sadly there was no snow this time if year.  The summit was amazing.  It was so cool to see all the observatories, even though we couldn’t see inside them.  It was pretty cold and windy up there, so we just stayed at the summit long enough to watch the Sun set.  It was pretty amazing watching the Sun set above the clouds.

After watching the Sun set, we headed back partway down the mountain, where it’s warmer, and a little less windy.  Our tour guide set up a telescope and started pointing out different constellations, and planets, and showing us a few things in the telescope.  I could have stayed there all night looking at the stars.  The view was pretty spectacular.  We saw 8 to 10 meteors, and many satellites.  I don’t think I have ever seen a satellite before.

When we were in Hawaii time didn’t seem to go fast at all, but now that we have been back a month, it really did go fast.  I really enjoyed it, and hope to get back there sometime again in my lifetime.  I just wish it wasn’t so far away, and so expensive.

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On day seven we spent the entire day at Volcanoes National Park.  It’s just like your typical national park, lots of trails and nature, but this one has a volcano too!  When we got there we were just in time to catch a ranger guided tour into the caldera of Kilauea.  The caldera was closed because the air quality is always changing, so the only way to get down there is on one of these tours.

It was a nice tour down.  The tour guide pointed out different vegetation and explained how vulnerable the indigenous plants, and animals are because they evolved to not have any defense mechanisms.  People have brought other plants to the islands and they grow wild suffocating out other plants.  Wild pigs are their biggest problem.  They eat big areas of vegetation leaving big holes, which fill up with water.  The water is breading grounds for mosquitoes, which spread disease, and kill indigenous birds, which then aren’t there to pollinate the plants, so even more plants die off.  It one big vicious circle.

Inside the Kilauea caldera was pretty cool.  It’s probably as close as a person can get to Halema’uma’u crater.  That is where it is still active and steaming.  Kilauea is actually the longest active volcano.  It’s been flowing since 1982, and the flows are always changing.  When we were there all the flows were underground.

After the tour to the Kilauea caldera we checked out a few other things in the park, some steam vents, some old lava tubes where lava once flowed underground, and a bunch of old lava flows.  We followed the old lava flows down to the cost.  It was pretty impressive.

We stayed in the park until sunset to see the glow from Halema’uma’u crater.  It was pretty cool, but too far away to get a decent picture.  Seeing Kilauea was pretty darn cool, and obviously a learning experience.

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Day five we left Oahu, and went to the Big Island.  We stayed in Hilo, which is the second largest city in Hawaii, but still rather small.  The whole island really felt small townish.  The first day we just went for a drive to check the island out.  We drove up the north shore since our plans for the next day were to go south.  Many areas felt like I was at home.  They had rolling hills of farmland, and little crappy towns with just a bar and convenience store.

Day six we drove sound to Punalu’u Black Sand Beach.  The black sand was weird.  Since it was black, your mind thinks you will get dirty in it, but it’s sand so it just brushes off.  That beach is famous for it’s sea turtles, but they were all out it the water, so we just saw a head peeking up from time to time.

After the beach we kept driving south.  That evening we were going night snorkeling with manta rays in Kona, but had the day to explore.

We then went to South Point.  It’s the southern most tip of the US.  It was a long rough road out there, and it really felt like the middle of nowhere.  At the point there was a cliff and people were jumping off into the ocean.  It was a crazy high cliff.  I didn’t even like to get close to the edge.  The Wife was crazy and wanted to jump.  I wasn’t going to let her, but then a few guys just jumped and were waiting for her in the water.  She jumped and hit the water hard.  She got a huge bruise on her leg, and lost her contacts when she hit the water.  She was a good sport about it though, and didn’t complain much about her pain.

From there we went on to go snorkeling with manta rays.  We went on a short catamaran ride and were just off the shore.  They placed a light rig in the water.  The light attracts plankton, which in turn attracts the manta rays.  It didn’t take long for them to appear.  It was so peaceful just floating in the water and watching how graceful the giant manta rays were.  They would come at the lights and just do flips eating up all the plankton they could get.  I wasn’t sure what to expect from night snorkeling, but it was pretty amazing.  It was just quite and peaceful watching the fish and manta rays swim around.

From there we had a crazy drive across the island.  I just set the GPS and followed it.  It was crazy drive through the middle of nowhere.  It was a very windy road with places that the road was actually missing.  It was super dark, and raining, and half the drive was uphill where it was hard to get over 40 MPH, and the second half was downhill and I never touched the gas peddle for the longest time, and it was hard not to speed.  I was so glad when we finally made it back to our hotel.

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On our fourth day in Hawaii we went snorkeling in Hanauma Bay.  This was only my second time ever snorkeling, and my best experience.  The Wife said it was nicer when she went snorkeling in Mexico though.  The water and beach were so nice.  I could have spent all day there, but we only had two hours, so I was out in the water basically the whole time.

We got back to our room around noon, so then we got cleaned up, grabbed a bite it eat, then spent a little more time on the beach.

That evening we went on a sunset catamaran ride.  It was a pretty sweet boat, and a nice little group of people on it.  We had an amazing view of downtown Honolulu, Waikiki Beach and Diamond Head Crater from out on the boat.  It wasn’t whale season, so we didn’t see any whales, but we did see a few dolphins briefly.  It was probably one of my favorite things we did in Hawaii, and it was the cheapest thing we did also.

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On our third day in Honolulu we were picked up by another tour guide in the morning.  We went on a “circle island” tour.  We basically went around the island stopping off at different points.  We saw very nice and less crowded beaches.  We went up into the mountains and saw some incredible views.  We saw the Dole plantations, and stopped and had the best pineapple ice cream I have ever had.

Then we went to the Polynesian Cultural Center.  I wasn’t sure what to expect there, but everything I read was that it was a must visit.  I don’t know if I agree, but we did have a good time.  The Polynesian Cultural Center is actually located on a BYU campus, and it pretty much ran by the students.  When we first got there we watched a little parade on a river when students were demonstrating different island cultural dances.

After the parade it was a little boring.  We walked around looking at different cultural demonstrations of different things.

Evenings at the Cultural Center they have a luau.  The luau was interesting, and it was nice to have some good local food, but it did seem very commercialized.  Later talking to other people I leaned that pretty much all the luaus on the island are that way now.

After the luau was watched an amazing show that included a lot of fire dancing.  The Polynesian Cultural Center may have been a little boring during the day, the food and show definitely made it worth the price.

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Day two our tour guide picked us up at 6:00 AM to visit Pearl Harbor.  We wanted to see as much of Pearl Harbor as possible, so we choose the “Day at Pearl Harbor” package. 

First we saw the Arizona Memorial, which was smaller and more unimpressive as I would have thought, but still pretty cool to see.  It was sad seeing all the names, and knowing many were still on the ship below us.

We then toured the USS Bowfin Submarine.  It was pretty cool, but I have toured other submarines, and it wasn’t much different. 

Then we toured the USS Missouri Battleship.  I have also toured many navel ships, so this one wasn’t much different.  We had a great tour guide that pointed out a dent in the side of the ship that was caused by a Japanese Kamikaze plane.  The dent was the only damage to the ship, but the dead Japanese pilot was left laying on the ship.  The thing that was cool was they gave him a proper burial at sea.  Although he was the enemy, he died fighting for his country and deserved a proper burial.  It felt weird standing in the spot where so much chaos happened so many years ago.  I felt that way the whole time we were in Pearl Harbor.

We then toured the Pacific Aviation Museum.  There they are restoring many planes, mostly by volunteers.  We saw many that were done, and then went into another building as saw some in the process of being restored.  The building still has bullet holes, and shot out windows from World War II.  Some of the planes were used as props in the movie, and we saw the lookout tower that’s in the movie.  I probably should see the movie now.

After all that our tour guide brought us back to our hotel, but we hit terrible rush hour traffic.  All the stopping and going was getting me car sick.  I rarely get car sick, but after the long day, I was.  I was lucky enough to make it back to our hotel before I throwing up.  I felt much better after that, but wanted a decent meal, that I knew would be good, so we ate at Margaritaville.  We wanted to avoid chains, but we have never ate at one before, and we knew the food would be good, and it was — best tuna steak I have ever had.

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So I am kind of sick about talking about our Hawaii vacation.  Everybody I run across wants to know all about it.  That is probably the main reason I have put off blogging about it.  I should probably start blogging about it while it’s all fresh in my head, not just for you to read, but for me to look back upon.

Hawaii is probably the first vacation spot that I have been to that I really want to go back to some time.  The weather there is perfect.  I’m not a big fan of hot weather, and was a little worried it would be too hot for me.  There always seemed to be a nice little breeze, and never once was I ever really hot.

One downside is it’s so far away.  It took 14 hours to get there, but surprisingly, it didn’t seem to take that long, probably because we kept turning our clocks back at each layover.  We had two one hour layovers, one in Denver, and one  in San Francisco.  One hour layovers are basically nothing.  Once you find your gate, find the bathroom, and find a place to sit, it’s about time to board the plane.  I thought having the two layovers was rather nice.  It was nice to get out and stretch our legs, and pee in a normal bathroom.  I have actually never been in a airplane bathroom before.  Plus now I can say I have been to California.  Just spent a hour at the airport, but I have now been to California.

We left at 6:00 AM and fourteen hours later it was 3:00 PM in Hawaii.  We knew the sunsets early there, but were planning on hitting the beach before that.  The traffic and parking in Honolulu was crazy.  I am glad we were smart and didn’t bother renting a car.  We were two blocks from the beach, and all of our activities picked us up in from of our hotel.

Our hotel wasn’t the nicest in the world, but it worked for us.  It was in a great location, and we were hardly ever there anyway.  It was clean, had a comfortable bed, and was reasonable priced.

Right after we checked into our room we hit the beach, and walked along the beachfront looking for something to eat.  It was kind of annoying walking the beachfront.  So many people trying to push stuff on you.  We only did the walk once, and didn’t find anyplace interesting to eat, so we just went back and ate at our hotel.  It was worst meal of our vacation.  I had mahi-mahi, and the wife had chicken, and neither of us really liked it.  It was a long day, so we just ate what we could and went back to our room to crash.

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I have been meaning to blog about our Hawaii vacation, but I have been busy catching up on everything I missed while I was gone.  This isn’t that post either.

This post is mostly about the technology of our vacation.  I saw my first iPad and iPhones it the wild.  I was kind of amazed at how many people have iPhones.  I guess that’s what happens in states that you can buy them.

I renting a mifi for my internet access over there.  It was cheaper than the hotel’s internet, and I could take it with me.  For the most part it worked really well.  I did run into the “unlimited” cap problem once though, and had to watch my usage for the rest of the week.  Companies should not be allowed to advertize “unlimited” when it clearly isn’t.  In the documentation it clearly stated that I have “unlimited” bandwidth as long as I don’t download or stream videos.  So I made sure not to stream or download video, and after just one day having iTunes open and downloading my podcasts, I got an email saying I was way over the “unlimited” limit.  So for the rest of the week I limited my podcast downloads.  In Honolulu my speeds were decent.  Slower than what I am use to, but usable.  In Hilo speeds were miserable, but for the most part were were out doing stuff, so I didn’t matter too much.  It would have sucked it I really needed to use the internet a lot there.

When we got home we were one iPod short of what we left with.  The wife left her Nano on the plane.  That kind of sucked, but she still has her Touch and Mini, so she will survive.  People that clean planes must get all kinds of goodies.

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