Plan A for November 26, 2018:  Plane tickets from St. Louis to Bali.

Plan B for November 26, 2018:  Movie tickets at our nearby mall.

This was a disappointing change for Ted and me, but not life-changing.  My successful surgery will have a far greater impact on my life.  We’ll go to Bali, Australia, and New Zealand next year.

I can’t wait to go back to Hawai’i for so many reasons.

The Cook (Norfolk) pines are everywhere along the coasts.

The albizia trees are some of my favorites.  When they reach about 15 feet in height, they grow wide at the top.  Their nickname is “the Lion King tree.”

This is a “sausage tree”–so named because of the shape of its fruit.

I love the open-sided restaurants and other buildings.

One restaurant had sugar packets personalized for individual islands.

There was a corkscrew beside the ice machine at the resort.

Aloha shirts are everywhere–even on the rest room signs.  (Sorry about the blurred men’s sign–I was rushing.)

Good times every day with the love of my life.

And more good times.

Aloha, Hawai’i.  I can’t wait to see you again.

Every day, after our stateroom on the ship was cleaned, there was a towel animal waiting for us.

Dinosaur

Dog

Elephant with beach towel

???  Animal missing here.  I used one of the towels before I remembered to photograph it in its previous life.

Monkey hanging from a shelf

Shy rabbit

Today’s excursion was the Grand Circle Tour.  The route took us from Honolulu across the island to the east coast of O’ahu, then up that coast and halfway across the northern coast before heading south again and back to Honolulu.  We were on the Kamehameha Highway most of the day.

Our first stop was the Nu’uana Pali Lookout, a 400-foot high cliff overlooking the eastern coast of O’ahu.  There was a lot of bamboo growing at the lookout point.  Our guide said there’s not much need for bamboo spears any more, so most of the bamboo on the islands is protected, and most of what is used becomes fishing poles.  The winds often blow at 80-100 mph at this lookout but today, the wind was only blowing at about 60 mph–we didn’t have to hold on to anything to keep from falling over, but walking into the wind was a challenge.

Kamehameha’s army dropped enemy soldiers over this cliff.  Some soldiers voluntarily jumped to their death because they didn’t want to be ruled by Kamehameha.

At least it was a warm 60 mph wind.

Our next stop was the Buddhist Bhyodo-In Temple.

The temple is beautifully set with the mountains at its back and an ocean view in the front.

To ring the temple bell, pull the log back, then let it go to strike the bell–a circle marks the spot.  Ringing the bell drives the evil spirits away.

We had to remove our shoes to enter the temple.  Inside we saw this Buddha figure.

Koi fish are plentiful in the streams around the temple.  The black swans are native to Australia.

Our lunch break was at the Kualoa Ranch, a site sacred to native Hawaiians from the 13th to the 18th century.  Hawaiian chiefs trained their sons in this sacred place and, in respect, ships dropped their sails when they passed this area.  The first 622 acres of the ranch were purchased in 1850 from King Kamehameha III for $1,300.  The ranch now includes about 4,000 acres.  Sugar cane crops were not successful here, so the Kualoa mill closed in 1870.  The ruins of the original sugar mill can still be seen along the Kamehameha Highway.  In 1941, the U.S. military occupied the land and used it for the Kualoa Airfield.  After World War II, the property was returned to the descendants of the original owner.  They decided to develop it as a nature preserve.

We had a tram tour of the ranch.  Naturally, it’s beautiful, but it’s too big for a photo.  Here’s a view from where we ate lunch.

The pandanus tree is planted along shorelines to break the wind and to provide shelter from storms.  Because of the appearance of its trunk, it is also called the “screw pine.”  The trunks are mostly hidden by the leaves, but look closely at the tree trunk in the left center of the picture to see some of the screw appearance.

This exotic-looking bird joined us for lunch.   Perhaps a member of the jay family?

We had a wonderful drive up the east coast to the north coast of O’ahu.

At many places like this, we would see a car parked on the side of the road while its occupants were swimming in the ocean.  There seems to be plenty of room for everyone to enjoy a private beach whenever they want to.

Just another awesome view, south of the Kualoa Ranch.

Look at that rainforest vegetation!  This side of the island averages more than 130 inches of rainfall annually.

Near the Kualoa Ranch, you can see Chinaman’s Hat Island (left of Ted) and Turtle Rock (far left of Ted) in the ocean.  You can see Ted and me too!

The Hawaiian beaches are out of this world!  It’s heavenly for a Pisces like me.  The two people in the left center have the beach to themselves.

This is the fruit of the lipstick tree.  When the sac is cracked open, it releases a red dye for lips and/or clothing.

There were high surf warnings out for the north shores of the island in the past few days.  Yesterday, the waves were 30 feet high; today they are only about 10-12 feet high.  Use the surfers as scale figures.

Pineapple is a major crop in Hawai’i, but there are no pineapple canneries.  The fruit is shipped to California for canning.  Note: we don’t know those two girls in the foreground, but they look like they’re enjoying themselves.

It’s very yellow in the Dole pineapple store.

We saw a demonstration on how to cut a pineapple and we learned how to tell when a pineapple is ripe.  (All the eyes are the same size; it “gives” about 1/16″ when squeezed; it doesn’t smell too sweet; the bottom is not pink.)

Spam is the state food of Hawai’i, due to the lack of raised meat on the islands.  Every year, there is a Spam Jam in Honolulu with competitions for the best Spam recipes.

Again, Ted and I had a wonderful day.  I’m beginning to be sorry it’s almost time to go home.  Am I becoming an Island Girl?

On our way to the Polynesian Cultural Center, we passed through Laie, O’ahu, the home of Haman Kalili to whom the shaka sign is attributed.  Kalili lost the three middle fingers of his right hand while working in the Kahuku Sugar Mill.  One part of his job was to signal that all is well, so the machines could be started.  Today’s shaka sign resembles what Kalili’s hand looked like when he signaled “ok” with his missing fingers.

Laie–home of the shaka and proud of it.  Is the sign mounted on a replica of the machine that cut off Kalili’s fingers?

When showing the shaka, the folded side of the hand faces the recipient and the wrist is waggled.

The Hawaiian islands and the surfing culture around the world picked up the symbol as a way to say “hang loose” or “that’s cool,” but it has come to mean more than that and is now a symbol of the “Aloha spirit”–a coordination of the mind and spirit to think and express good feelings toward others.  It reflects reverence, solidarity, compassion and friendship, and is a sign of respect and mutual understanding for the recipient.  The current mayor of Laie, O’ahu used the shaka as the iconic symbol of his campaign–and he won.

Today is the official Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, so Honolulu started the day with a parade.

There were a lot of marching/walking groups, cars with politicians and beauty contest winners, and Polynesian dancers.

The Hari Krishna had a large float.  Members of the group walked alongside the float and handed out bananas to parade watchers.  Remember when the Hari Krishna handed out flowers at airports?

Our excursion bus picked us up in front of the hotel along the parade route.  The Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC) is on the opposite side of O’ahu from Honolulu, but the drive isn’t as far as mainlanders like us might think.  We had to take two of the three interstate highways in Hawai’i:  I-1 and I-2.  (Guess what the third one is numbered.)  Without traffic, the drive would have been about an hour.  People from the eastern side of O’ahu regularly commute to Honolulu for work.  The scenery all the way is gorgeous, like all of Hawai’i, but this is my favorite scenery photo of today’s trip.

It’s a breathtaking view.  If you think it looks familiar, you might have seen Jurassic Park.

Ted and I had purchased all-day PCC tickets that allowed us to explore the park on our own, eat lunch on our own, partake of the the buffet dinner (included in the ticket price), and watch the closing performance.  Well, the guide on the bus earns his salary, because I think he talked everyone on the bus with basic ($90) tickets (most of us) into upgrading at an additional cost of about $150/couple.  Is this built into the experience?  A cynical person would say “yes.”  Here were the advantages of the upgrade:

(1) The park is open from noon until 6:00 p.m.  The evening performance begins at 7:30.  (2) If you order lunch in advance instead of eating on your own, your order (choose 1 of 3 meals) will be called in from the bus and you will be able to enter the restaurant and eat immediately upon arrival at the park, allowing more time to enjoy the exhibits.  (3) Paying for a tour guide will assure that you arrive at each of the six Polynesian “villages” at the time of their main performance.  (4) The included buffet dinner is served at 4:00 p.m.; the bare-bones luau begins at 4:45 p.m.  It takes more than a full day to see everything in the park, so either of these two options cuts deeply into the visitors’ time at the exhibits.  (5) The Ali’i Luau Buffet (upgrade) is served at 6:00 p.m., allowing visitors to spend maximum time at the exhibits, and it includes a performance with the meal.  It ends just in time to be seated at the 7:30 p.m. evening performance.

Ted and I were not aware of the time constraints of the basic all-day tickets, so we caved to the marketing ploy and upgraded.  Having done that, would we do it again?  Absolutely!  It was well-worth the price to have lunch waiting, see all six cultural performances, and enjoy the full luau experience before ending the day with the evening show.  The PCC’s web page has a brief overview of some of the things we saw in the Polynesian villages.  It’s a video, so it shows the quality of our day better than my still photos do.

We’re ready to begin our guided walk through the PCC.

We each received a lei when we entered the PCC.  I think they’re made of kukui nuts.

There are six island nations in Polynesia, so the PCC is divided into six villages with each village featuring one nation:  Hawai’i, Tonga, Tahiti, New Zealand (Aotearoa), Fiji, and Samoa.  Each nation has a representative color, but I don’t remember which is which except that Hawai’i is blue.

This building is part of the New Zealand (Aotearoa) village.  There was a speaker to tell us about NZ, followed by a dancing performance.

In the Parade of Colors, members of each nation perform a native dance on a platform canoe.

The dances of each nation are similar, but individually distinctive.

The canoe goes under a bridge when it enters/leaves the lagoon, so the dancers have to finish their performance in time to duck.

This might have been the Tonga village.  We witnessed a (fake) wedding ceremony.

At the close of the ceremony, the bride and groom are draped in a single wedding cloak to symbolize that they are now one.

There were cultural lessons at each village, including hula lessons and warrior dance lessons.

The warrior dances and the drumming were spectacular at this village.  Three men from the audience were chosen to participate and they were good enough at repartee and mimicking the performers to try out for the show.

Poi is made from the taro plant.  Taro is a purple root plant that is crushed to make a bland, but extremely healthy paste.  Poi contains no allergens, it’s safe to feed it to two-week-old babies, and it’s also good for the elderly or sick who cannot digest more complex foods.  It doesn’t spoil, but it becomes more acidic as it ages.  Its nutrients are believed to be one reason for the beautiful Hawaiian complexions.

The luau was in another open-sided building.  I love this climate!

That purple thing on my plate is a poi dinner roll.  It was delicious, but Ted decided to pass on purple food.

There were more cultural dances during dinner . . .

. . . including a fire dancer.

Honeymooners and those celebrating anniversaries were invited to come onstage and dance.  The guy in the blue shirt was picked as the best dancer.  When the MC asked his spouse if the man was a good dancer, she replied, “Oh, yeah!”  He had a lot of endurance and did a decent imitation of a hula too.

We got a flower lei at the luau.  Now we’re ready for the evening show.

The evening performance is called Ha:  Breath of Life and was excellent.  It began with the birth of a child, then progressed through the stages of the child’s life:  learning to hunt from his father, becoming a man, choosing a wife, and having a child of his own.  The ending affirmed the theme of Ohana Falls–life is an endless cycle of birth and death.  It was very moving and uplifting.

Pearl Harbor is north of Honolulu on the west side of O’ahu.  Early on December 7, 1941, a private at Kahuku on the north point of the island noticed some blips on his radar screen, so he called his commanding officer and reported his observation.  On that day, twelve B-17s were approaching Hawai’i from California, intended for use in the Philippine Islands.  The private was not supposed to know about the B-17s, so the commanding officer told him not to worry about the radar blips.  In fact, the blips were Japanese bombers approaching Pearl Harbor.

To save fuel, the B-17s were flying with skeleton crews and no ammunition.  When they saw fighter aircraft coming to meet them, the pilots assumed they were American planes and were happy to have an escort to the landing field.  When the “friendly” planes started firing at them, the B-17 pilots thought it was a military drill.  When the “friendly” planes started strafing the aircraft lined up on Hickam Field at Pearl Harbor, one of the B-17 pilots thought “Somebody’s going to the brig for using live ammunition!”  Unfortunately, the event was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the U.S. into World War II.

Pearl Harbor is now a National Historic Landmark as well as an active military base.  Ted and I visited the site today.

The entrance to the Pearl Harbor memorials has the USS Missouri (“Mighty MO”) as its focal point and 50 U.S. flags lining the walkway.  The Missouri was built 108 feet wide so it could pass through the 110-foot wide Panama Canal.  From keel to top, it is 20 stories tall.  Walking around on the battleship gives visitors a chance to experience how massive it is.

Here’s a view of the Missouri from the Arizona memorial.  The white markers signify the places at which other U.S. battleships were sunk by Japanese bombers.

This is one of the mess halls on the Missouri.

Surprising to me, but necessary if you think about it–a dental office on board a battleship.

The sailors referred to their tight sleeping quarters as “coffin racks.”

Flags for all 50 states fly on the quarterdeck of the Missouri.  They are arranged in order of their entry into the Union.

At the beginning of our tour of the Missouri, each visitor was asked to say where they were from.  Ted and I said “Missouri” and the tour guide responded with “Welcome to your ship.”  We found the Missouri state flag on the quarterdeck.  It’s the last visible unfurled flag on the right in the picture above this one.

The USS Missouri was the site of the surrender of the Empire of Japan which ended World War II.  The ceremony lasted 23 minutes and included high-ranking personnel from each of the Allied nations.  Playing all his power cards to intimidate the Japanese, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allies, had 3,000 uniformed U.S. military men on board for the ceremony and over 200 warships in the harbor surrounding the Missouri.  When everyone was assembled on deck, MacArthur pulled one more power play and made the assemblage wait a full two minutes for him.  When the formalities were complete, 1,000 military planes performed a ceremonial flyover above the Missouri.

During the surrender ceremony, the deck of the Missouri was decorated with this 31-star American flag that had been taken ashore by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853 after his squadron of “Black Ships” sailed into Tokyo Bay to force the opening of Japan’s ports to foreign trade.  The flag was displayed with the reverse side showing because it was so fragile that the conservator at the Naval Academy Museum had sewn a protective linen backing to one side to help prevent the fabric from deteriorating, leaving its “wrong side” visible.  The flag was displayed in a wood-framed case secured to the bulkhead overlooking the surrender ceremony.

A shuttle boat takes visitors from the Pearl Harbor pier to the USS Arizona memorial in the harbor.

The Arizona Memorial does not touch the water.  It is a Navy tradition that those who die in service remain on eternal assignment, so the memorial hovers above the sunken battleship to protect the ship and the resting place of the 1,102 servicemen who are entombed in the wreckage.

The sunken Arizona is visible from the memorial building.

This wall includes the names of the servicemen who died on board the Arizona in the Pearl Harbor attack–the greatest death toll ever on a U.S. warship.  Only 229 bodies were recovered.

The guns of the battleship Missouri are symbolically aimed over the Arizona Memorial to protect the sunken ship and the entombed servicemen.  The Arizona was the first ship to be sunk by the Japanese, beginning the U.S. involvement in World War II; the Missouri was the battleship on which the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed to end World War II.

In addition to the Arizona memorial and the battleship Missouri, the Pearl Harbor memorials also include the USS Bowfin–a World War II-era submarine, and the Pacific Aviation Museum–two hangars housing World War II planes.

This looks like a control tower–probably because it’s on an airfield–but it’s actually a water tower.  It was prominently featured in the movies Tora, Tora, Tora and Pearl Harbor.

This is a popular piece of art.  We saw a larger version of it in Key West last spring.

This is a B-25 like my dad piloted in World War II.  He told me once that when he looks back at these planes, he wonders how the pilots ever had the nerve to fly them over the ocean.

The Purple Heart is the oldest military decoration in the U.S., going back to George Washington’s “Badge of Military Merit.”  After 1942, the Purple Heart was presented only for being wounded in combat.  The name of this medal is derived from purpleheart wood–the only wood used for building artillery carriages in the American Revolution.  It is stronger than oak and is the only wood capable of withstanding the constant stress of repeated firing.

Freedom isn’t free.  It’s a cliché, but it’s true.

Today, our ship docked in Honolulu.  The cruising part of our Hawaiian vacation is over, and we were in the process of disembarking when the ship went on lockdown because an alarm went off.  It was soon discovered that a piece of luggage had fallen over and triggered the alarm.  Since there was no clear and/or present danger, the disembarkation process was resumed.  [Author’s note:  Maybe alarms should be located above the height of a suitcase.]  We got off the ship and took a cab to our resort.  The man who checked us into our room said we’d just missed the half hour of panic.  “Why, what happened?” we asked.

Well, if it’s not a drill, what is it?  Let’s see what the U.S. Pacific Command has to say.

And then came the explanation. 

Really?  I can’t even overwrite a computer file or photo without telling my computer at least twice that I really, really want to overwrite the file, but an incoming missile alert can be sent with a single click?  Well, the good news is that Ted and I didn’t know anything about this, so we stayed very calm.  Sometimes, it’s less stressful to be ignorant.

Moving on with our day, we took our luggage up to our room.

On the way to our room, I heard squawking and saw two parrots in trees on the resort grounds.  We’re not in Missouri any more!

We got a free upgrade to a small suite, which was lovely.  The shower stall alone was nearly as big as the entire bathroom on the cruise ship, and the bathroom suite was only a little smaller than our ship stateroom.  We could definitely spread out in here.

The two balconies in our suite had water views.

The resort is huge.  It has eight high-rise towers of rooms, lots of shops and restaurants, several pools, open seating areas, etc. and all of it is right on Waikiki Beach in view of Diamond Head.  We needed a map to get around, and spent some enjoyable time discovering the amenities available to us.

Here are two of the eight towers of rooms at the resort.  There are people on the beach and you could swim or rent paddleboats in this little pool of ocean water.

As we explored the resort, we saw an appropriate door stop at a shoe store.

This is a shopping/restaurant area of the resort along one of the entrances.  One of the things I noticed everywhere we went was that there is a lot of shade.  Add an ocean breeze, and it’s wonderfully comfortable outside–even in January.

We were assigned to the Rainbow Tower.

It’s a big resort, but it was easy to find our room–just look for the rainbow.  There’s another rainbow mosaic on the opposite (ocean) side of the tower.

The Rainbow Tower is iconic.  It was built in 1969 and its focal point is 2.5 miles away on the ocean side.  It was purposely set at the beach along the flight corridor of HNL airport to welcome visitors to Honolulu.  The two rainbow mosaics on the building each have 16,000 glazed tiles that were hand-painted.  They form the world’s largest ceramic-tile mosaics at 286 feet high and 26 feet wide.

Here’s a close-up of the tiles.

The Rainbow Tower is stunning at night.

We spent the entire day relaxing, walking around the resort, sitting on the beach, and just enjoying the warm January weather.  It was a nice change from being on a timetable for our daily cruise excursions.  We loved the excursions, but it was easy to spend a day relaxing without a schedule.  As we were meandering, Ted and I saw a T-shirt that described our day:  “Could you be more Pacific?”

The sunsets behind the palm trees over the Pacific seem magical.

The Na Pali Coast State Park spans 17 miles of the North Shore of Kaua’i, and is rated by National Geographic as one of the 50 most beautiful places in the world.  Na Pali literally means “the cliffs.”  This area is a sacred place that includes beautiful beaches, waterfalls, deep and narrow valleys, rugged terrain, and cliffs that rise 4,000 feet above the ocean.  The park is inaccessible to vehicles.  A day-hike trail goes through the park, but doesn’t provide the panoramic views of the park’s beauty that can be seen from the sea or from the air.  The best views of the coastline are from the sea.  (Think about it:  Coast.  Sea.)

Kaua’i was settled hundreds of years ago by Polynesian navigators who were followed by Tahitian migrants.  After Captain James Cook landed in Kaua’i in the late 18th century, other western settlers followed.  Western diseases killed the native population, and the last known Hawaiian natives to inhabit the Na Pali Coast were sighted in the early 20th century.

Our ship cruised slowly past the Na Pali Coast, giving us two hours of viewing from our stateroom balcony.  There’s little I can say about how beautiful this cruise was.  My amateur cell phone camera photos will need to do their best.

Here are some of the people whose staterooms were on the other side of the ship.

Our first view of the north coastal mountains.

We cruised from 4:00 p.m. until sunset, and my pictures show the changing colors as the sun drops lower in the sky.

There were high surf warnings out for the north shores of the islands.  You can see waves crashing on the beaches.

As the sun gets lower, the red color of the rocks is highlighted.

At one time, about 200 Hawaiians lived in this valley.  They were, by necessity, totally self-sufficient, and supported themselves with farming, fishing, and a little bit of trading with other islands by canoe.

This location was used in “The Descendants” movie.  There wasn’t any human action in the scene–only the scenery.

Clouds begin to form as the air cools at sunset.

The red volcanic rock is a beautiful contrast to the green vegetation, the blue water, and the white waves.

The sun is setting over the Pacific as we sail beyond the state park area.  You can see the Hawaiian islands of Ni’ihau (center) and Ni’hoa (right) on the horizon below the clouds.

Today, our ship docked at Nawiliwili, Kaua’i.  I asked our excursion guide how to pronounce the name of the city.  He replied, “It’s actually nah-villy-villy.  A lot of people say nah-willy-willy, but it willy doesn’t matter.”  (A local, joke, I’m sure.)  [Author’s note:  Hawai’i is also properly pronounced ha-vy-ee.]

This was our wake-up view this morning.  There are similarities in the four islands we’ve visited, but each is a very unique place to visit and explore.

Kaua’i is called the “garden isle.”  It is the oldest of the Hawaiian Islands and has soil.  The volcanoes on Kaua’i are inactive and the island is now in the erosion stage.  It becomes slightly smaller with each rainfall, so in 5-6 million years, it will be no more than an atoll.  At least there’s time for Ted and me to come back before that happens.  The average annual rainfall at Kaua’i’s mountaintops is 460 inches; at sea level on the western (dry) side of the island, it’s 2 inches.

Hawai’i has 13 of the 15 microclimates, which I found very interesting.  It lacks the extreme cold and the extreme hot microclimates.  Within almost any 15-minute drive on our tours, we see weather changes–warmer or cooler, rainy or sunny, calm or windy.  When it rains, the rain never lasts very long–maybe 5 minutes–but it rains repeatedly, and it never stays sunny very long in the wet areas like the rainforests.  It never stays rainy very long either.

Today’s excursion was titled “The Best of Kaua’i” and took us first to Waimea Canyon, “The Grand Canyon of the Pacific,” on the west side of the island.  The canyon is at 3,600 feet elevation, so we went through some microclimates to get here from our sea level dock.

Waimea Canyon is colored by the red and brown exposed volcanic rock mingled with the blue and green tropical vegetation.

The canyon is 10 miles long, one mile wide, and 3,000 feet deep.

This Hawaiian man at the Waimea Canyon State Park gave us a lot of information about the Hawaiian culture.  Hawaiian life is based on the islands’ name:  Hawai’i.  Ha = breath of life; wai (vi) = fresh water; and i (ee) = creator.  These are the three things needed to live simply.

From Waimea Canyon, we drove southward along the western coast and stopped in Koloa for a delicious Hawaiian lunch at a local restaurant.  One of the things I enjoy about Hawai’i is the open-air buildings, like this restaurant.  There is a roof and there are interior walls, but no exterior walls.  The roof is needed to protect people and furnishings from the sun and rain, but the air is so pleasantly warm that it’s nice to have a breeze and unnecessary to have exterior walls–even in the winter.

I don’t have a picture of the restaurant, but this is the check-in desk at our resort.  It had no exterior walls or doorways.

The white patch on the right is ocean spray from Spouting Horn, a small blowhole on our drive along the coast.

After lunch, we headed for the Fern Grotto on the east side of Kaua’i.  Along the way, we had a variety of beautiful scenery.

There’s so much water in Hawai’i and it’s all beautiful.

Here you can see ooa (dark clouds, rain) coming over the mountains.  They are probably dropping some of the 460 inches of annual rainfall.  The red soil is volcanic.  The tree on the right that looks dead is actually in its winter stage and will become green in spring.  There aren’t many deciduous trees in Hawai’i.  In fact, I didn’t see any bare trees except for this type.

Kaua’i has soil, so crops can grow.  In one field, I saw corn with tassels–in January!

I couldn’t believe it when I saw this saguaro cactus today–on the dry western side of the island, of course.  A woman who lived on Kaua’i collected cactus plants and brought the saguaro to the island.  She had the largest collection of cactus west of the U.S. mainland.  The saguaro is not protected here as it is in the mainland Southwest.

Local residents refer to this as the “Verizon tree.”

These are obviously coconut palms.  (Duh!)

We had some pretty stops along the Wailua River on our way to the Fern Grotto.

There were waterfalls, of course.

At another stop, we had a pretty view of part of the river valley.

Kaua’i is sometimes referred to as “chicken island” because there are so many wild chickens here.  There are chickens on the other islands too, but not as many.  The Polynesians brought chickens to the islands for food.  The chickens have no natural predators and are protected on state and federal lands.  Anywhere else, it’s legal to catch–but not to shoot–chickens to eat.  Not many people hunt chickens, however, because going to Safeway is much easier.  We stopped on our drive to the Fern Grotto for what our driver called liki-liki (leaky-leaky)–Hawaiian slang for a rest stop. 

The chickens like to gather in the tourist areas, and there were a lot of them at this liki-liki stop.  I didn’t see any all-white chickens on any of the islands; most were red or brown.

When we got closer to the Fern Grotto, we boarded a riverboat and had a nice little cruise, complete with Hawaiian music and dancing.  We learned today that ukelele is properly pronounced oo-kah-lay-lay.  It was named by Hawaiians who saw someone playing the instrument.  The audience was mesmerized by how quickly the musician’s fingers moved over the frets.  Trying to find an appropriate Hawaiian name for the instrument, they settled on uke (oo-kah), which means “fleas” and lele (lay-lay) which means jumping.  The musician’s fingers moved like jumping fleas.

There were a lot of people on the river in kayaks and canoes.

We had a short walk through a rainforest (we’re on the east side of the island now) to the Fern Grotto.

This is a philodendron overgrowing a tree trunk.  The leaves are huge, and it’s just one of many vines doing this.

Here’s one of the groves of bamboo in the rainforest . . . and of course, my trusty scale figure–Ted.

This is big bamboo!

This entire volcanic rock wall is covered with ferns and has water dripping and running over it.  It was a beautiful and peaceful place.  It used to be sacred ground and is frequently used as a setting for weddings.

Before closing, I have to share something our driver told us.  The Hawaiian word for cattle is pipi (pee-pee) and the Hawaiian word for appetizer is pupu (poo-poo).  The driver suggested that the next time we go to our butchers, we ask for some pipi-pupu (beef appetizers).

To quote Jeff’s blog about his visit to Hawai’i, it was another day in Paradise.

Before boarding the tender to return to the ship, Ted and I had some time to explore a small area of Kona.

Quinn’s couldn’t get beachfront property, so they named their restaurant accordingly–“Quinn’s Almost by the Sea.”

Wal-Mart isn’t within walking distance of the dock, but there’s money to be made from the tourists.  To capture that market, the store provides a free shuttle from the dock to its retail site.  We saw a similar K-Mart shuttle at another port.

This is Ted’s destination birthday trip, so the girls gave him gift money for his birthday with instructions to spend it in Hawai’i.  Today, he bought some aloha shirts. This is Shirt #1 . . .

. . . and this is Shirt #2.  Jeff also bought aloha shirts on his Hawaiian vacation in August.  Now he and Ted can break them out together next summer.

The onboard entertainment this evening was a comedian who kept us laughing constantly for an hour.  Did you know that people in Dubai don’t like the Flintstones?  But people in Abu Dhabi do.  (Hee hee!)  In one part of the program, the comedian mocked the stateroom bathrooms.  He commented on how small the shower stall is and mimicked trying to move his arms upward, turning around, and bending over, while muttering, “Hmm, this is going to call for some decision-making.  Aww, I’ll just wash that part when I get home.”  He followed up by saying this is the first time he’s been able to take a shower, brush his teeth, and use the toilet–all at the same time.  When we returned to our stateroom after the show, Ted and I decided to take some photos to illustrate this.

Here’s the shower stall. Ted has about an inch to spare for moving his arms.  Luckily, neither of us dropped anything while showering, because bending over would indeed be tricky.

It looks like it’s true that you could shower at least part of your body while brushing your teeth and, if necessity required it, you might be able to use the toilet at the same time.

Yes, we’re having fun, fun, fun.

Kealakekua Bay (pronounce each vowel), is about 20 miles south of Kona on the Big Island, and is believed to be the place where Captain James Cook arrived in 1778.  He was searching for a northwest passage to England and stopped in Hawai’i, seeking shelter from the winter months.  I can tell you from experience that Hawai’i in the winter has a much nicer climate than England in the summer!

Yesterday, our excursion took us to four of the five volcanoes that formed Hawai’i; today, we were on the fifth one.  We were able to see vog–volcanic smog.  It makes sense if you think about it:  the active volcanoes on Hawai’i are always spewing smoke that contains ash so, logically, there are a lot of ash particles in the air, making the mountaintops look hazy.  Kona is most famous for its coffee.  It has the perfect climate to produce eight million pounds of coffee per year.

Hawai’i’s beaches have a variety of sand colors, including white, black, and green.  I liked the black sand beach on Maui, and wanted to see a rare green sand beach, but it wasn’t on our excursion itinerary.  Green sand beaches exist only on Hawai’i and in the Galapagos Islands, Guam, and Norway.  Ted and I will have to see a green sand beach on our next trip to the islands.  In the Hawaiian Islands, nearly all the shoreline is public.  Isn’t that a great idea?  I hate that, on the U.S. mainland, hotels, resorts, and beachfront property owners can claim beaches as their private property!

Kona means “leeward side” in Hawaiian, meaning it’s on the west side of the island.  (Remember the easterly trades.)  While Volcanoes National Park on the east side of the island gets over 100 inches of rain/year, Kona gets fewer than 10 inches.  Although Hawai’i is more than twice the size of all the other Hawaiian Islands combined, it is the least populated island per square mile.  Most people on Hawai’i live in Hilo and along the Kona coast (properly called the Kohala-Kona coast because Kona is technically a district, not a city).  Kona’s harbor was too small and shallow for our ship, so we had to dock offshore and take a tender to the city.

The tender was launched from our ship.  As a tender (aka shuttle), it can carry 97 people; as a lifeboat, it can carry 150 people.  It is stocked with food and survival items, and feels a lot safer and more comfortable than the lifeboats in the “Titanic” movie.

Anyone with some knowledge of Hawai’i has heard of King Kamehameha.  Kamehameha was born as Halley’s Comet passed over.  The comet was interpreted as a sign that a boy child of great power would be born and that he would be a “slayer of chiefs.”  To protect him from assassination by other less powerful chiefs, Kamehameha was sent as a child to live in isolation with his aunt and uncle on another island.  Meha means “lonely.”  The Hawaiian language repeats words for emphasis, so Kamehameha means “very lonely”–a description of his childhood.  Kamehameha was an imposing person.  His actual shoe size is known and, from that, he is estimated to have been at least seven feet tall.

Like all young Hawaiian men of his time, Kamehameha trained to become a warrior.  He witnessed Captain Cook being clubbed to death and saw the British Brown Bess muskets in action.  He decided to master the use of the British modern weaponry, unite the islands, and prevent any other foreign power from conquering them in the future.  He was the first chief/king to unite the islands, each of which previously had its own chief and government, but it was not a peaceful unification–he defeated the other chiefs in battles, beginning with his cousin who was also a chief.

We had a wonderful excursion today to the Secret Falls of Kohala.  (Of course, if there are excursions to the falls, they are no longer a secret.)  It was over an hour’s drive to the trailhead, so we had a chance to see some of the evolving landscape of Hawai’i.  It reminded Ted and me of Iceland–another “new” landscape that is visibly evolving.

This is an area that has been “recently” covered by fresh lava, so it is nearly completely barren.

This lava surface is older.  Grasses and plants are becoming more prolific.

This is an “old” part of Hawai’i and has real soil that can support trees and shrubs.

The first part of our ride to the trailhead was on paved roads in a nice, 15-passenger van (there were only 12 people in our group, plus the guide).  The first hint of change was when we parked at a rest stop and the guide handed out backpacks, water, trekking poles, and sunscreen.  (Ted and I already had all of those things–except the trekking poles–with us, and so did a few of the other people.)  Then he directed us to a 6-wheel drive vehicle that we’d need for the off-road part of the drive.

My first ride in an OTR vehicle.

Here’s our cozy group, ready for adventure.

There were dangers as we drove first on a gravel path, then on mud tracks, and then across open land, including pastures.

Part of the gravel path.  The driver had to get out to open and close some gates along the way.

The hike included this bridge over a part of Alexander and Baldwin’s aqueduct.

Later on, there was a narrow suspension bridge.

This is a level part of the trail we hiked.  The forest became denser and the trail became steeper as we worked our way upward to the Secret Falls of Kohana.

You can see that this area of the trail would become overgrown rapidly if it weren’t cut back regularly for hiking groups.

Here are the Secret Falls.  There were several waterfalls along the trail, but this one was my favorite.  It is also called Ohana Falls.  “Ohana” means family.  The falls begin as one, then branch into many–like children and grandchildren.  At the bottom, all the members re-unite in a single stream, and the family cycle is repeated.

The next waterfall included a nice pool for swimming.  About half of our group got in the water, but I abstained.  I wasn’t eager to swim in water colder than 65 degrees.  I’ll do it if Ted and I come back in the summer.

Our reward for the hike was a hilltop picnic.

It’s hard to imagine a better lunchtime view.  In the movie “The Descendants,” this is the pristine piece of land the family considered selling.

When we returned to the ship after a wonderful day outdoors, Ted and I enjoyed the sunset over the Pacific from our stateroom balcony.

Getting ready for our excursion

Today was the first of our two days on Hawai’i, the Big Island.  Surprisingly, Hawai’i is only 36 miles from Maui and you can easily see Maui from the northwest shore of Hawai’i.  Our excursion today took us to Volcanoes National Park, and to a rainforest, an orchid nursery, and a macadamia nut plantation.  We were hoping to see Kilauea’s flowing lava in the park, but learned that a large part of the park is currently closed.  Kilauea is Hawai’i’s biggest tourist attraction.  Its name means “The Spewing,” and it has erupted every day since 1983.  The volcano is currently acting like it might produce a major eruption, so the flowing lava can only be viewed from a distance at sea right now.  The rainforest, orchids, and nuts were safe for visitors.

Before leaving for the park, we had to gather in the ship’s theater to get our transportation instructions, etc.  The lady telling us what to do was pretty amusing, considering it was 8:00 a.m.  We were cautioned that Hawai’i has very strict agricultural rules.  If we want to take macadamia nuts (or any other food purchase) home, we cannot open the packaging (seriously).  The speaker warned us that if we are buying nuts as a gift for someone at home, it might be safer to have them shipped, since no one wants to receive a nut that used to be chocolate-covered.  She told us that, except for those who requested a vegetarian lunch, the box lunches are all the same–last night’s leftovers.  We were told that we’d be back at the ship around 3:30–except for those who signed up for the Volcano Sacrifice Tour.

On our way to the buses, I asked a driver if Hawaiians actually wear aloha shirts or if that’s part of the uniform for those who work with tourists.  He told me he retired to Hawai’i with two dozen business suits and quickly learned that an aloha shirt is considered dressy; if it’s tucked in and accompanied by a lei, it’s formal.

Things I learned today

(1) If there is a tsunami, we should return to the ship.  We are safest at sea during a tsunami.  (2) The Hawaiian Island chain is 1,500 miles long, and extends to Midway Island.  Kaua’i is old and in the erosion phase; Hawai’i is young and still growing.  The entire chain is moving northward.  At one time, Kaua’i was located where Hawai’i now exists.  (3) Captain Cook was killed and cooked on Hawai’i.  Hawai’i is geologically young and its scarce soil must be used for food.  It’s impossible to dig a grave in lava rock, so bodies are cremated.  (4) The “cleaner fish” is endemic to Hawai’i.  It has an extra fin on its belly that acts as a suction cup.  The fish uses the fin to clean other fish and will do the same to people in the water.  These fish are sometimes used in spas for pedicures, etc.  (5) Breadfruit can be cooked just like potatoes–boiled, fried, mashed, etc.  I had some with my lunch one day and it tastes like potatoes, but just a little sweeter and creamier.  (6) Macadamia nuts ripen at different times on the trees, then fall to the ground when they are ripe.  They must be picked up by hand before they begin to rot on the ground, and that’s what makes them so expensive.  (7) Five volcanoes built Hawai’i.  Kilauea is the most active; Mauna Loa is the most massive; and Mauna Kea is the tallest–in Hawai’i and on earth.  It rises 33,476 feet above its ocean floor base.

Photo gallery

This is a breadfruit tree.  Breadfruit are a little larger than grapefruit.

Some of the orchids at the orchid nursery.  Hawai’i is well-known as the Big Island, but all the islands also have nicknames.  Hawai’i’s nickname is The Orchid Island.

These orchids are huge.  I should have included my hand in the picture for scale.  They are gorgeous!

We were allowed to view this crater.  Look closely–it’s a crater within a crater.

The Hawaiian Islands were built by shield volcanoes.  Shield volcanoes have more flowing lava, rather than the kind that shoots rocks high into the sky.  That’s why this lava looks smooth.  It’s not–it’s like glass and will scrape your skin if you fall on it.

Plants are beginning to erode this lava to form soil.

This is the beginning of a lava tube.  During eruptions, lava repeatedly flows in this path, cutting away the bottom and sides and leaving residue at the top.  Eventually, the residue meets on the top and forms a tube.  Eruptions can send multiple plumes of lava upward through a lava tube to the surface.

Here’s an entrance to a quarter-mile long lava tube.  The longest known lava tube on Hawai’i is 32 miles in length.

This lava tube is lighted inside, so we could find our way through it.

Hilo is on the east side of Hawai’i, so it’s in the rainy part and gets 120 inches of rain annually.  We walked through a rainforest during our excursion today.

This tree can move itself if it doesn’t like where it’s growing or if conditions change. The large brown lumps indicated by the arrows are roots.  Eventually, the branch to which they are attached will fall, and the roots will begin to grow a tree where they land.  The process can be repeated by the tree as needed.

You have to be at a distance to see Mauna Loa (“Long Mountain”), so this picture isn’t great, but–hey!–it’s Mauna Loa, the world’s densest and most massive mountain, comprised of 10,000 cubic miles of iron-hard lava.  It rises 30,085 feet from its ocean floor base–not quite as high as Mauna Kea.

Ted and I wanted to take the excursion to Lahaina (the city of royalty) today, but the ticket agent told us she’d sold the last two tickets just five minutes before we came to her desk.  We took that to be a sign that we should have a vacation day today, so we spent the day relaxing.  Lahaina translates to “hot sun” because it is always very hot there.  We stayed cool(er) instead.

We took some time to explore the ship and found out there is an “upscale” restaurant upstairs from the restaurant where we ate dinner last night.  The stairway to the upstairs restaurant is inside the downstairs restaurant, so you have to enter one to get to the other.  The downstairs restaurant is casual and allows shorts; the upstairs restaurant requires trousers and button-down shirts for men and dresses for women.  The dress code upstairs doesn’t seem to be enforced, because we saw men eating in shorts and women wearing jeans.  The most surprising thing was that the menu in both restaurants is exactly the same!  We even recognized some of the staff from the downstairs restaurant working in the upstairs one.  I don’t get the “upscale” part about wearing different clothes to eat the same food served by the same people.

The ship’s dock site was a five-minute walk from downtown Kahului, so we walked to the mall for lunch and checked out the area a little bit.  Then it was back to relaxing poolside.  We enjoyed live music, beverages, and ice cream, and had a pleasant afternoon in the warm Maui sunshine.

Here’s the main pool area on the ship.

The band and singer are onstage at the left.  The arrow shows where Ted is taking it easy today.  The empty chair at his side is mine.

We were told it was a good day because the clouds lifted enough to see Mt. Pu’u Kukui, one of Maui’s volcanoes.

A bit of Maui weather

Hawai’i is called the “rainbow state” and it’s easy to see why.  I lost count of rainbows sometime after seven today.  I think nearly every place on earth claims that “if you don’t like the weather, wait a day and it will change.”  In Hawai’i, change “a day” to “five minutes.”  The rain comes and goes quickly and repeatedly throughout the day.  Annual rainfall on Maui ranges from 10 inches to over 400 inches–and that’s within a 15-minute drive!

The Hawaiian Islands were formed by a north-south range of volcanic mountains.  Weather in Hawai’i is influenced by the eastern trade winds, so storms approach from the east and move westward.  As a result, more rain falls on the eastern side of the islands as the clouds move westward over the mountains, making the western side of the islands much drier.  It looked odd to see trees leaning to the west as a result of constant winds.  In the Midwest, the wind blows them to the east.

A few Maui facts

(1) The Apollo astronauts trained on Maui’s Haleakala Volcano because it is high, cold, and resembles the surface of the moon.  (2) Maui is indeed the home of “Maui wowee.”  (3) Until 1926, there was only ship access to Maui.  Motor vehicles were rare on the island before the 1940s.  (4) Hana is a very important shipping port for pineapple.  The Maui Gold pineapple is trademarked and very sweet.  I don’t like pineapple very much, but Maui Gold is unbelievably good!  (5) The yellow bamboo that grows in the Hawai’ian islands is so strong, the Chinese use it for scaffolding.  (6) Few people live on Maui, and most of the island has no electricity or water system.  The “shopping area” in one part of Maui is a single fruit stand.  Conditions are even more primitive deeper in the rainforest.  There are not enough children on the island to support a school, so children are home-schooled or they board on another island.

A bamboo house in the rainforest.

A little Maui history

[This is a long story, so I’m going to greatly condense it.]  The chief of Maui was good buddies with a sugar cane plantation owner (I forgot his name).  As a result, that plantation owner got a lot of political favors from the king and had the biggest sugar cane plantation on the island.  Alexander and Baldwin (yes, of Baldwin pianos) had the second and third largest sugar cane plantations, but no political favors.  Alexander and Baldwin looked at all the rain in the mountains and at their dry sugar fields in the lowlands (see the first paragraph, above) and decided they could use gravity to bring water down both sides of the mountains to supply water for people and for sugar cane everywhere on the island.

In 1876, Alexander and Baldwin proposed a plan to the king:  they would build a 17-mile-long aqueduct to move the water and they would complete it in 18 months.  If they were successful, all other plantation owners would pay them for water rights.  The king and his buddy agreed to the plan because they didn’t think this could be done in 18 months.  When Alexander and Baldwin failed to meet the deadline, the king would confiscate whatever was completed, finish it, and collect the water rights himself.  Surprise!  Alexander and Baldwin completed the aqueduct with about a week to spare, collected the water rights money, and then became the richest sugar cane plantation owners on Maui.  Today, no sugar cane is grown in the Hawaiian Islands.  Sugar beets replaced cane, and the last sugar cane was harvested two years ago.

Why is this story important?  Because the Road to Hana–a popular tourist attraction–was the original path Alexander and Baldwin cut through the jungle and rainforest to build their aqueducts.  The aqueducts are visible all along the Road to Hana and still carry water down from the mountains.

A lot of Maui pictures

The rainbow eucalyptus shows its colors especially well when it’s wet (every day).

Twin waterfalls.  There are so many waterfalls in Hawai’i, they’re not locally remarkable.

A black sand beach, formed by eroded black volcanic rock.  Look!  It’s warm enough for people to swim in the ocean in January!

Hawai’i was formed by shield volcanoes.  Shield volcanoes form lava tubes.  Here’s the entrance to a lava tube at the black sand beach.

Inside the lava tube.

The other end of the lava tube at the black sand beach.

Because ship’s masts often broke in storms, Captain James Cook introduced the Cook (Norfolk) pine to the coasts of the islands, where they would be accessible to ships’ crews.  Cook pines grow very straight and tall, so they could be used as replacement masts.  Unfortunately, they tend to break near the joints where the branches grow, so they are only a temporary fix.  These Cook pines are all leaning toward the west.

Unbelievably thick vegetation everywhere!

Beautiful rainforest plants.

The red flowers on the trees are African tulips.  In some places, there are so many, it looks like red leaves in the fall in the Midwest.

Vegetation that grows wild enough to cover cars.  I verified three cars in varying stages of overgrowth.  (You can barely see the front wheel cover of the third car.)  There might be a fourth car on the far right.

A beautiful overlook and the next shower (and resulting rainbow) moving toward us–from the east, of course.

The waves thunder when they come into this cove.

Wind surfers on the north shore of Maui.

Waking up to Hawai’i

Ted and I have finally checked off our 50th state.  We’ve talked about going to Hawai’i for about five years and we’re here at last.  It’s January, there’s a winter weather advisory out for St. Peters, and we’re wearing shorts and sandals.  Life is definitely good.

It’s Diamond Head!  We’re really in Hawai’i!

Beach umbrellas in the warm sunshine of Waikiki.

Ted’s and my feet in the Pacific Ocean at Waikiki Beach.  Aaahhh!  (Mine are the shaved legs.)

All aboard!

After lunch, we had a little time to explore the resort and then we needed to board the ship for our Hawaiian cruise.  The cruise offers two days on each of four islands–Maui, Hawai’i, Kaua’i, and O’ahu–and seemed like an easier way to travel between islands than spending time at airports.  We’ll only need to unpack once, and the captain will transport us in the evenings while we enjoy onboard entertainment and sleep.

It’s Hawai’i, so it’s time for a piña colada while we wait to set sail.

Poolside entertainment to amuse us before we leave port.

A hula lesson onboard to get us in a Hawaiian mood.

Leaving Honolulu and heading for Maui.

Ready to relax and to live on “island time.”

The airport

Because of our flight delay to Honolulu, Ted and I had time to explore the DFW terminal.  We found some interesting things.

Hungry?  Have some bacon.

This guy stood at the door of a store that sold “dermatologist approved” cosmetics.  If this is the dermatologist who approved them, choose a different brand.

We ate lunch at a 60s retro restaurant.  Our tabletop advertised Pan Am’s new Strato Clipper planes and bed-length “Sleeperette” easy chairs that allowed all passengers to recline and sleep on long night flights–at no additional charge.  For an extra $10, you could have a sleeping berth.  There were also complimentary cocktails, a midnight snack bar, and a “hearty hot breakfast” onboard.  Those were the days!

The flight

The initial information about our flight delay to Honolulu was sketchy.  After we finally boarded our plane at 4:00 pm–five hours later than scheduled–the pilot gave us a more detailed version over the intercom.  Because of the bomb cyclone on the East Coast, there was only one Boeing 777 plane at DFW–and that plane had a major maintenance problem that could not be fixed in a single day.  All the other available 777s were delayed at East Coast airports.  As a result, we had to wait until the flight from Miami arrived in Dallas.  Not only did we have to wait until the plane was cleaned after its flight to Dallas, but because we were going to fly over the Pacific, the plane needed an additional safety inspection.  It’s always something, isn’t it?  At least we had a safe plane, but that’s about all I can say that was good about the flight.

[Whining section here]  I’m pretty sure American Airlines squeezes in several additional rows of seats on their 777s, because I barely had room for my legs between my seat cushion and the seat back ahead of me.  The section of the main cabin in which Ted and I were seated was very cold–so cold that, every time a flight attendant walked past our seats, the attendant said “Whew!  It’s cold over here!” and kept on walking, presumably to a warmer section of the plane.  When a passenger asked if the temperature could be raised, the flight attendant said it would warm up in a couple hours.  Gee, thanks (and no, it didn’t).  We needed our jackets and the airline blankets to prevent frostbite and I was still shivering.  Eventually, it was mealtime and we were offered a “snack meal”–the soggiest, coldest wrap I’ve ever seen.  The dough on my wrap was disintegrating because it was so wet!  It came with a cookie and a cold beverage.  We were not even offered additional food for purchase (not that it would have been any tastier).  This was our sustenance while we were in the air for 8.5 hours.  Compare this to our overseas experience on KLM where we had lots of leg room, were served a choice of three delicious hot meals and an additional large snack, were offered three beverage runs that included free wine, and enjoyed it all in a comfortable cabin.  Ted and I decided we will never never never fly American again, except to use up the miles we’ve accrued on some short flights.  [End of whining section]  

I nearly forgot to mention that Ted and I had a comparatively good experience on the flight.  About three hours into the flight, the flight crew issued an intercom request for anyone with “medical training” to please report to a crew member.  A few minutes later, the request was changed to “We need someone with an M.D. or an O.D.”  Someone on the flight was feeling worse than cold, cramped and hungry.

The happy ending

It was 75 degrees when we got off the plane in Hawai’i.  We felt like zombies after our 3-4 hours of sleep and the long, uncomfortable day of travel, so we checked in at the resort, ordered a meal at a resort restaurant (it was only 8:30 in Hawai’i), and went to bed.  Tomorrow will be a better day.

Ted set the alarm for 5:00 a.m. today so that we would have time to purchase a beverage at the airport before boarding our 8:00 a.m. flight to Dallas.  After getting through security and the 20-minute beverage line, we took our hot chocolate (me) and coffee (Ted) to the gate, waited 15 minutes, and boarded our plane.

The flight was uneventful and on time, which was good, because we only had 45 minutes to get to the gate for our flight to Honolulu.  Our first priority was to find a schedule board to get the gate number.  Good news:  we were only two gates away.  Bad news:  our 10:55 connecting flight is delayed until 3:00 p.m.!!!  There was an apparently major mechanical problem with our plane.  The working plane will leave the hangar at 1:00 and will arrive at the gate at 2:00.  We’ll board at 2:30, leave at 3:00, and arrive in Honolulu at 7:30, Honolulu time.

Allowing for the time zone change, this will be 15.5 hours after we left St. Louis and 18.5 hours after we got up with only a few hours of sleep.  Then we’ll have to claim our baggage, take the shuttle to the resort, and check into our room.

It’s good that we’ll be on a safe plane, and it’s good that it will be warm in Honolulu, but I don’t think we’ll be using Plan A–spend the afternoon at the beach.

Last night, as Ted and I were putting things together for our trip to Hawai’i tomorrow, we came across the term “water shoes.”  We didn’t know what they were, so we looked them up on Google.  A quick glance told us they would be perfect for several of the day excursions we’ve planned in Hawai’i.

The next step was to Google “water shoes st louis mo.”  This morning, I called the indicated sporting goods and shoe stores.  Only REI had water shoes in January.  Even better, they had a pair in Ted’s size and one in my size.  Jenny apologized for not having any of the second brand they carry for us to look at.  Don’t worry, Jenny.  We’re happy we found what we want in time to put them in our suitcases tonight.

We left Jeff’s house this morning and headed for the Monument Rocks (chalk cliffs) near Oakley, KS.  Last night, we set our alarm an hour early to compensate for the change to CST and to allow daylight time for viewing the Monument Rocks.  Jeff and La asked when we’d be getting home, and we told them we were planning to spend today and two more days in Kansas, arriving home Friday night (this is Wednesday).

Some of the chalk cliff formations.  (Thank you, Google.)

We stopped in Colby for lunch, at the turn-off to Oakley . . . Maybe it was because the weather was cold . . . Maybe we’ve been traveling too long . . . Maybe we’ve spent too many years driving directly east and west on I-70 when we visit Jeff’s family . . . Whatever it might have been, Ted and I suggested to each other that maybe we should just go home.  We calculated what time we’d get home (around midnight because we hadn’t left Jeff’s house as early as usual), decided we could live with it, and hit the road.

We had a wonderful trip around the Southwest.

…States visited:  9  (Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas)

…Miles driven:  6,070

…Days away from home:  31

…Time zone changes:  6 (CDT to MDT in New Mexico; MDT to MST in Arizona–they don’t do daylight time; MST to PDT in Las Vegas–a 2-hour time difference; PDT to MDT in Utah; MDT to MST in Colorado–daylight savings time ended; and MST to CST in Kansas.)  At one point, we were so unsure of what time it was and which devices were showing the correct time, that I actually called the hotel desk to ask what time it was so we could set our alarm for the correct time!

…Significant sites visited:  10 national parks; 5 national monuments; 3 national sites (VLA, Hoover Dam, Kitt Peak Observatory); 2 state parks; and 1 UNESCO World Heritage Site.

…Highlight of the trip (if we have to choose only one):  the mass ascension of 550 balloons at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta.

…Fun we had:  infinite.

Following our Royal Gorge Route train ride, Ted and I returned to Pueblo, where we are spending the night.  Pueblo’s Riverwalk and Historic District were a 5-10 minute walk from our hotel, and we had plenty of time to explore them–a little.  It was Sunday afternoon, and not much was open, but it was good to be outside and getting some exercise, even though it was only 42 degrees.

Pueblo’s Riverwalk is not in the San Antonio Riverwalk class, but it was pretty.  It looks like it might be a new development, so maybe it needs some time to attract more businesses along the Arkansas river.

Here’s another view of the Riverwalk.  They’re hard to see in the shadows, but on the left walkway, there’s a couple walking.  The lady is wearing a red jacket.  Now look in the previous picture and find the lady in the red jacket.  Same lady.  That couple was walking in the opposite direction as we were, so we saw them coming and going both ways.

I’m not sure of the reason for this mural, but it was fun to identify the people depicted by the artist.

Nearby was another mural including the omnipresent Southwest chili pepper.  We see them depicted everywhere, including on personalized license plates and in souvenir shops.

Here’s a view of the main street through the Historic District.  There were some architecturally beautiful buildings in this area.

This sculpture was near our hotel (the building in the far left center of the photo).

We enjoyed Pueblo’s Riverwalk and Historic District, but were ready to come indoors to warm up after an hour in the 40-something temperature.  We decided to relax in the hotel’s seating area with a cup of hot chocolate.  These are the good times!

Today, Ted and I took a two-hour train ride through the Royal Gorge.  Trains always run along the rivers in the bottoms of canyons, so I didn’t have to worry about heights.  The Royal Gorge Route Railroad is a “heritage railway”–one that preserves railway scenes of the past.  The route follows the Arkansas River between the 1,000-foot tall granite cliffs of Colorado’s grandest canyon, and is described as “America’s most spectacular rail journey.”  When Teddy Roosevelt rode this route, he called it “the trip that bankrupts the English language.”

The Royal Gorge Route departs from the Santa Fe Depot in Canon City, CO.

The first car of the train is named “Theodore Roosevelt.”  Each of the 10-12 cars had a different name.

Here’s that good-looking couple again!  We had tickets for a vista dome car, so our views were wonderful.

There was an open-air car for unobstructed viewing.  The train moved slowly, so it was a safe ride, but it got cold in the shadows between the canyon walls.

This is the Royal Gorge Bridge–955 feet above us.  We could see people walking on it and looking over the sides.

The holiday village is ready for the Santa Express in December.

Can you see the man’s face in the center near the top of the canyon wall?  He is called “The Guardian of the Gorge,” and his name is Cliff Rock.

We saw about a dozen whitewater rafters navigating the Arkansas River.

Near the top center, look for the red dot.  That is three joined cable cars crossing the Royal Gorge.

We just managed to squeeze this enjoyable two-hour activity into our trip.  The train schedule is down from four runs daily in the summer to one run each on Saturday and Sunday, and next weekend is the last trip until spring.  For Ted and me, it was another highlight of the wonderful vacation we’re having in the Southwest.

Ted and I started our day with a visit to the Taos Pueblo and ended the day in Pueblo, CO–in other words, we went from pueblo to Pueblo.  (Insert groan here.)

The Taos Pueblo is over 1,000 years old.  It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is an active, living community, not a reproduction of pueblo life.  All of the pueblos belong to the community, but the homes in the pueblos belong to individual families.  Living in the pueblo means having no modern amenities–no electricity or running water.  Residents usually have a propane stove for cooking and heating.

In 1847, the Taos Pueblo revolted against the U.S. Military and won.  The Taos Pueblo people have never been conquered, and have maintained their culture and tradition.  Tiwa is the native Taos Pueblo language.  It is an oral language and could disappear quickly, so the tribal elementary schools teach Tiwa and English.  Tribal high schools require an additional foreign language, so tribal members are fluent in at least three languages.  The Spanish brought Catholicism to the tribe, and the church in the pueblo is Catholic, but tribal members also practice their native religion.  Yesterday, we were unable to visit the Taos Pueblo because the tribe was celebrating a native religious holiday.

Here is a portion of the wall that surrounds the Taos Pueblo.  It was originally 13 feet high for protection.

The white arch is the entry to the churchyard.  This is a Catholic church.  Only the far end of the building (crosses on the roof) is the church; the other part is pueblo homes.  More homes are in the right background.

There are currently four resident families in the pueblo, numbering about 25 people, but there are another 1,500 tribal members living on tribal land outside the pueblo.  As long as they are living outside the pueblo wall, they may have a modern lifestyle.  Tribal members pay federal taxes, but they have their own tribal government.  Most people use their pueblo home as a second home:  they live outside the pueblo walls, but return to the pueblo for religious holidays and community events.  Many of the homes are shops, selling food and handmade items to tourists.

This is the largest building in the Taos Pueblo, and has five levels.  Each doorway is a separate home.  The homes are small–about 12 feet square with low ceilings.  Food is prepared in adobe ovens or on propane stoves.  The adobe walls in all the pueblo buildings are 3-5 feet thick to keep the interior cool in the summer and to keep it warm in the winter.

Originally, pueblo homes had no doors.  Ladders were used to climb up to the roof and then to climb down into the home through a “skylight.”   This provided protection from intruders.  Today, the homes have doors cut into them.  Many are painted blue to ward off evil spirits.

This is a view through a series of drying racks.  Meats and vegetables are hung on the upper crossbars to dry and preserve for future use.

Adobe ovens are used for baking.  Cedar wood is burned inside for about an hour to heat the oven.  Then the wood and ashes are removed, the to-be-baked goods are put inside, and the door is covered.  The inside baking temperature is 300-400 degrees, and each oven can hold 25-30 loaves of bread.

The center structure is another multi-story pueblo.  Smaller pueblo homes surround it.  To grasp the size of the pueblo homes, subtract 3-5 foot thick walls from the exterior measurement.  The stream in the foreground comes directly from the mountain and is untreated, but it is so clean that it can be used for everything–washing, cooking, bathing, etc.

The center building with the bell tower was the original pueblo church.  The U.S. Military destroyed it during an attack, believing that the pueblo residents were hiding in it.  (They had actually hidden in the mountains.)  The original churchyard area is now used as a cemetery.  There is an oven in the center of the picture and pueblo homes on the left and right.

After our visit to the Taos Pueblo, Ted and I had lunch at a microbrewery in Taos.  Local restaurants are always interesting.  This one had a “painting” made of beer bottle caps.

I apologize for the blurring, but you get the idea of how creative a beer-cap artist can be.

Ted and I have been driving scenic roads whenever we can.  Today, we followed New Mexico SH64.  It was curvy, mountainous, and beautiful.  I think our average speed was under 40 mph, but we were in no hurry and the views were worth it.  Part of the highway was named the “Enchanted Circle Scenic Byway,” and quite a bit of it was the historic Santa Fe Trail as well.

Winter is getting closer, and it’s becoming a challenge to find fall colors on the trees.  Picture yellow-gold leaves on these trees.

Here’s a village nestled in a valley.

To quote Sting, “Heavy cloud, but no rain” to spoil our views on SR 64.

The Santa Fe Trail continued on I-25.

After visiting Roswell, NM and Hooper, CO–two sites where large numbers of people have reported sightings of UFOs, Ted seems to be getting into the mood.  He thought he saw a UFO in the sky today.

Oh, those funny meteorologists!

Ted and I are back in New Mexico today.  Can you believe that, after waiting so many years to check New Mexico off our “states visited” list, we’ve been in the state twice on the same road trip?!

On our drive to Taos, NM today, Ted and I drove over the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge.  There’s a parking lot at one end of the bridge, sidewalks along both sides of the highway, and an overview area on each side in the center of the bridge.  We parked and headed for the overview areas.  Ooops!  As soon as the bridge left solid land and went over the gorge, my knees felt weak and I had to focus on looking at the sidewalk and the road–I couldn’t look down, because the gorge is so deep.  I stood with my back to the view and checked out the more distant view across the bridge.  Ted had to take the pictures again, just like at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

Keep in mind that Ted couldn’t get the top and the bottom of the gorge into the same picture.  Also, it’s always a lot farther to the bottom than a photo makes it appear.  This gorge was very deep–800 feet.

When we arrived in Taos, the first thing we noticed was the traffic.  A two-lane highway runs through the city and it was clogged in both directions.  We picked a place to eat based on the large number of cars parked in front, and had a nice lunch.  Then we put our car in a public parking lot and set out on foot to explore this colorful and quaint town that seems to epitomize the architecture of the Southwest.  Taos is a popular skiing destination and also a cultural center.  The streets are lined with art galleries.

This is the city square.  It is surrounded by adobe shops, of course and, like all city squares, traffic goes one way around it.

Here’s a little corner of shops in the historic district of downtown Taos.

I found an unusual interpretation of the pictographs on the hand dryer in a rest room.

This guy seems to have a permanent parking spot on the main street of Taos.  Honk if you agree.

The weather was very nice, so Ted and I stopped at a cafe in the historic district and enjoyed an afternoon snack outdoors.

What a lovely surprise at the end of the afternoon when we checked into our hotel.  Ted finds hotels through his AAA travel books and through Google, so we’re never sure exactly what they will be like, except that they’re clean and have basic amenities.  Sometimes we find out the hotel is geared toward hunters (signs advising guests not to clean game in the room), and sometimes they’re more luxurious than we expected.  Our Taos hotel is 0.4 miles from downtown–walking distance–and encompasses nine acres!  It’s very Southwestern in style and has beautiful grounds and luxurious rooms.  We have a jet tub and a fireplace in our room, and there’s not a game-cleaning rag in sight.

This is the view toward the entrance where the valet met us.

Guest rooms are clustered in small buildings scattered all around the property.  Here are some rooms with a view of the Secret Circle of plantings and water features.

This is a view of the section of the grounds called the Mountain Green.

We had hoped to visit the Taos Pueblo today, but it is closed for a ceremony.  The Pueblo is an inhabited, active community, and people in town told us that, yes, every now and then they close for some private event.  They are re-opening at 8:00 tomorrow morning, so we’re going to stop on our way to Pueblo, CO.

In mountainous areas, winter weather forecasts regularly mention “snow in the higher elevations.”  We saw fresh snow on the ground in many places today, because we’re spending a lot of time at the higher elevations.  With the exception of five days below 5,000 feet (Las Cruces, NM; Tucson, AZ; and Las Vegas, NV), Ted and I have been spending our days at elevations of 5,252-11,318 feet since October 13, when we arrived in Albuquerque, NM for the Balloon Fiesta.  We can climb several flights of stairs and/or walk vigorously uphill without puffing, so I’d say we’re acclimated to the thinner air.

Clean fresh snow on the high mountaintops.

Clean fresh snow at our traveling elevation too.  There was ice on the lake surfaces this morning.

There’s not enough snow at the ski resorts yet, so the snow machines have been busy making the ski runs usable.

We drove through Leadville, CO today and saw some very colorful houses.  I remember learning that, in Alaska, people like bright-colored houses to cheer them up during the long, dark winter.  Maybe that’s true in Leadville too, because there are a lot of houses painted in cheerful, bright designs.

This house is decorated in shades of blue and green.  It’s hard to see, but the second house to the left is done in shades of red and pink.

This homeowner chose blue, purple, and pink for his colorful facade.

The UFO Watchtower near Hooper, CO was along our route today, so we stopped for a visit.  After all, we’ve already checked out the UFO history in Roswell, NM.  The Watchtower was started as a joke by a lady who bought a ranch, then found out she couldn’t successfully raise cattle on it.  She knew that UFO watchers would sometimes visit her ranch after dark, so she decided to make money by building a gift shop in a saucer dome with a viewing platform.

The San Luis Valley, where the Watchtower is located, is revered among flying saucer buffs as one of the best places in the world to see UFOs.  Twenty psychics have visited the site and have identified two large vortexes and outlined them with rocks.  The vortex area is known as the “Healing Garden,” and tourists add items to the clutter in the stone circles.

A cautionary sign at the entrance to the Watchtower area.

The viewing platform sits beside the gift shop.  The gift shop is only open on weekends this time of year, so we couldn’t purchase any alien-type items.

There are two concentric stone circles here.  I could only get an (almost) semi-circle in my photo.  The stone outlines are a bit hard to see through the clutter.

Here’s the Healing Garden from ground level.  Name an object (preferably junky), and there is probably at least one here–ballpoint pens, single socks, a baseball, Mardi Gras beads, etc.

A recovered spaceship?

The highlight of today’s travel was Great Sand Dunes National Park.  We visited this park on a trip with our kids in the middle ’80s and had a good time in the sand dunes.  (Except Kari, who got an asthma attack–probably from the dust or from the 7,500-foot altitude.)  It’s the only national park I can remember visiting that has no “stay on the designated trail” signs.  There are no trails in the dunes, and the Park Service has apparently decided that tourists can do no harm to the sand.  We didn’t even see a sign telling us not to take any rocks or sand particles out of the park.

These are the tallest sand dunes in North America.  The dunefield covers thirty square miles and sits in isolation among the mountains and the desert.  It looks a little out of place–like someone put it here and forgot to pick it up and put it where it belongs.  Star Dune is the tallest at 750 feet; High Dune is 650 feet.  Wouldn’t it be more logical for High Dune to be the tallest?  Who named these dunes, the government?

Here’s a long-range shot of the Great Sand Dunes with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains behind them.

Here’s a picture taken at the base of the dunes.

To appreciate the size of the dunes, use the people walking on them and in front of them as a scale.  You might have to zoom in on this picture to see the people on top of the tallest dune.  There are five people up there.  Three people are on the right of the peak, and the figure on the left at the peak is actually two people standing close to each other.

Tonight:  Alamosa, CO.

Tomorrow:  Taos, NM, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Ted and I started our day by taking the pedestrian bridge from our hotel to downtown Glenwood Springs, CO.  It was a 5-minute walk vs. a 30-minute drive through the construction zones.  We still had to face some of the dreaded orange cones, because they indicated the crosswalk for us to get to and from the bridge.

Does this look like a crosswalk or a barrier?  There are two lines of yellow tape strung along the cones; therefore, it’s a crosswalk for pedestrians, but a barrier for vehicles.  This is nothing compared to the number of traffic cones at two of the corners we had to drive around yesterday.

Glenwood Springs is an old town and looks very historic–except for the modern-day traffic that is backed up waiting to turn at the corner in the picture above.  Traffic was lighter today and there were no traffic cops.  I have no idea what made yesterday so special that everyone wanted to clog up the streets.

The back-up continues to the right of the photo.  Somewhere around the distant rise in the road in the left center of the picture is the corner where these cars can turn left.  If we could have gone straight here yesterday, we’d have been at our hotel just across the bridge.

Our goal today was to visit the Railroad Museum.  Admission is $2.00 and the docent will start the two model trains whenever visitors ask to see them run.  It’s obviously not a world-class museum, but the depot is an interesting building and the museum is housed in what used to be the Ladies’ Waiting Room, so it sounded like an interesting way to spend a little time.

The red-roofed building is the still-active train depot as seen from the pedestrian bridge.  The Colorado River is flowing on the left, and the historic Hotel Denver is on the right.

This is what greeted us at the museum door.  Today is Wednesday.  The “season” seems to end in this area the last weekend in October, so a lot of businesses have reduced hours.  On the bright side, hotels are cheaper.

We could see through the windows.  This is the entire museum.  The tracks for the two model trains are visible on the table in the right center of the photo.

Moving on, we had a delicious lunch at a restaurant in the Hotel Denver and then walked around and admired the beautiful historic 4½-star hotel.

Here’s a view down the hallway from the lobby.

This is the seating area across from the check-in desk in the above picture.  On the other side of the front door is a similar room with a grand piano.

We drove I-70 through the Glenwood Canyon and had more scenic mountain views most of the way to Vail.  Here are some that were a little different than what we’ve been seeing every day.  The snow on the mountaintops is fresh.

We had a very enjoyable afternoon in Vail, despite temperatures in the mid-40s and a wind advisory.  Vail’s bus system is free and has a bus stop at our hotel door, so we took the bus to the town of Vail and then to Lionshead Village.  After returning to the hotel to freshen up, we took the bus back to Vail for dinner.

The town of Vail was built as the base village for the massive Vail Ski Resort–the largest ski mountain in Colorado.  The town has Bavarian-style architecture and is pretty and charming, but pure tourist-y.

Some of the Bavarian-styled shops in Vail.

I thought this was the prettiest shop.

This is my picture postcard view of Vail from the covered bridge in the town.

Notice the snow fences on the roofs of the buildings.  Some buildings had signs warning passers-by to watch out for snow falling from the roofs.  No danger of that today.

There are sculptures everywhere in Vail.  Most are very art-y, but this one of Uncle Albert was more playful.

This sculpture is a memorial to the ski troopers.  The ski troopers fought in Kiska, the Aleutian Islands, and Italy in WW2.

A few trees still have leaves, making this a pretty little park.

At night, the twinkle lights come on.  I assume there will be many more twinkling in the next few weeks.

This is a skating rink.  No ice on it yet, but man-made snow already marks the ski trails on the mountains.

One of the sidewalks in Vail had a puzzle stamped into the blocks.  Any readers who like to work puzzles have probably seen the type that instructs you to change one word to another in x-number of moves, changing one letter at a time.  The sidewalk changed bird to hare in eleven moves.  If you’re challenged, try it.  The solution is at the bottom of this post.

And then there was pie.  As Ted and I were selecting a restaurant for our dinner and reading the reviews, we saw this one.

Guess what we had for dessert tonight.  Warm fried blackberry pie with fresh blackberries, covered with cinnamon sugar, and topped with vanilla gelato and shaved white chocolate curls.

I asked the waiter how they make this pie.  Partially bake a pie crust circle so it will hold together.  Add mashed blackberries and fold the crust over to make a semi-circle, then crimp the edge.  Bake it a few minutes to set the crust, then deep-fry it until done.  Cover with cinnamon and sugar, and add the trimmings.  It was a delicious dessert choice and unlike any pie we’ve ever had before.

During the afternoon, we saw a store with a green cross on it and remarked that, in Europe, a green cross indicates a pharmacy.  Sure enough, a sign indicated that this store sells “natural medicinals” and provides “recreational sales.”  Oh, that’s right–we’re in Colorado and it’s legal here.  Then, this evening, we saw this in a different store window.

Define “high”–8,150 feet or natural medicinals?

Glenwood Springs and Vail were fun.  Here’s the puzzle solution:

Bird-bard-lard-lord-load-toad-road-read-head-herd-hard-hare.  Each word was stamped in sequence in a trail of sidewalk blocks.  Clever!

Today was an easy day for us–not too much driving, and not much to do.  Our drive on I-70 from Grand Junction to Glenwood Springs, CO was very scenic all the way.

We had a hard time getting to our motel in Glenwood Springs.  We needed to leave I-70 at Exit 116, but it was closed due to construction of the SR82 overpass, which connects north and south Glenwood Springs.  We had to take Exit 114 and follow detour signs.  The exit took us to the south side of I-70; our hotel was on the north side of I-70.  It was crazy!!  Traffic was heavy, many streets were one-way, and there were at least half a dozen traffic circles–some two in a row–at which we had to determine when to leave the circle.

Traffic cops were stationed all over (two were in Hallowe’en costumes–Darth Vader and the Wicked Witch of the West), and the roads were filled with orange and white traffic cones that either:  (1) outlined a path to follow; or (2) blocked entrance to a path.  With everything else going on, it was even hard to determine what the traffic cones were trying to do!  We finally made it to our hotel–nearly an hour after leaving I-70.  This road project has apparently been underway since early August and won’t be finished until late November.  Ted and I wondered if the traffic cops are on duty all day every day.  We bet they are.

Glenwood Springs is named for its hot springs.  Our hotel has a hot spring pool and spa, and it was very tempting to get into the warm water and just relax after maneuvering our way through the traffic snarls.  Unfortunately, the air temperature was only in the 50s, so we chickened out of getting wet and warm and then having to shiver our way to the locker rooms.  The people in the picture below were braver than we were.

We planned to visit the Railroad Museum this afternoon, but it’s on the other side of I-70 and wasn’t going be open very long after we fought our way back to it.  A little research showed that it’s only a 0.4 mile walk one way from the hotel, and there is a pedestrian bridge over I-70.  That bridge is open.  Our new plan is to visit the Railroad Museum in the morning before we leave Glenwood Springs.  We’re adaptable, but if you’re planning to visit Glenwood Springs, I suggest waiting until the road project is finished.

We left Moab, UT this morning via scenic highway 128.  Scenic.  Definitely scenic.

Highway 128 is apparently popular with bikers.  We passed a lot of them.

Every curve (the road was 45 mph and all curves) had a beautiful view of red rocks.

The highway follows the Colorado River, so we had pretty river views along the way as well.

The fall colors we’ve been seeing over the past week have been gorgeous.  The trend continued along highway 128.

Our first destination in Colorful Colorado was the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, near Montrose, CO.  We visited this national park many years ago with our kids on a Colorado vacation, but decided it was time to see it again.  This canyon was named “Black” because it is so deep, so sheer, and so narrow that little sunlight can penetrate it.  It has been described as “impenetrable” for humans and shows no evidence of human occupation except at its rims.  The Black Canyon is so steep that the Gunnison River drops an average of 96 feet per mile over its 48 miles in the canyon.  One two-mile stretch drops 480 feet.

The overlooks were perched on the tops of the steep, sheer canyon walls.  It was so far to the bottom (at least 1,500 feet in most places) that I was too scared to go all the way to the edge of the overlooks.  The heights didn’t bother Ted, so he took all the canyon pictures for us.  You can tell how far back I had to stand to feel comfortable.  I’m a coward, I know.

We could hear the river at all the overlooks, but it was sometimes difficult to see.  At one spot, Ted had to look straight down to see the river.  I didn’t get close enough to see that view, but this one was visible from farther back.

This is one of the trails we took to the overlooks.  I always walked as far from the outside edge as I could, and I never, never looked down.

Here are some views of the rock walls of the canyon.  I took the first and fourth pictures because I could see the canyon from my safety zone.  Ted took the second and third photos from the overlooks.

This part of the canyon is called the Painted Wall, for obvious reasons.  It is the highest cliff in Colorado at 2,300 feet–almost twice the height of the Empire State Building.  That’s why I was always afraid to look down.  What if I’d fall?  I know it was emotion over logic, but if I tried to look straight down to the bottom, my knees felt weak and I got a nervous feeling.  At this point, the Gunnison River is at 5,000 feet elevation.  Add the 2,300 feet of canyon wall, and Ted and I were standing at 7,300 feet above sea level.

Even though I kept my distance from the edges of the overlooks and the trails, I still enjoyed re-visiting the Black Canyon.  I’m glad Ted was able to take some very nice pictures of it for us to enjoy after our visit.

  Canyonlands–number five of Utah’s Mighty 5® national parks.

Ted’s and my first stop in Canyonlands NP was the Mesa Arch.

We’re not far from Arches NP, so it’s not surprising to find a similar erosion pattern in Canyonlands.

Here’s a canyon view through the arch.

It’s easy to drive from place to place in Canyonlands, because the park’s scenic drive goes over the top of a mesa.  The canyons are eroded at lower levels and the mesa provides a good viewing point of them.  We took pictures of scenes we liked, so I don’t have names for all of them, but the first one is called The Maze.  I wonder why.  The pictures below are representative of what Ted and I saw on our day in this national park.

I think the photo below looks like an underwater view, with formations above and below sea level.  Maybe that’s how it was before the erosion began millions of years ago.  The solid, level blue is a distant mesa, and the sun shining into my camera lens created the hazy look.

Notice the dirt road at the top of the cliff wall on the left in the picture below.  Then look at the second picture, which shows how that road winds down into the canyon.  Ted and I counted 8-10 cars navigating the road very carefully and very slowly.  It’s steep and has tight curves, but no guardrails.  The third photo shows the road straightening out (a little) at the bottom of the canyon.

The trails we walked on today were marked with rock cairns.  I think that might have been necessary because there was more rock than dirt on the trails, making it hard to follow a specific path.

We missed what was probably the best trail and the best view of the entire park because we’d already walked short trails for almost four hours before we arrived at Upheaval Dome.  It was getting late in the day and this trail looked steep and difficult.  The syncline loop trail around the rim was rated primitive and strenuous and required topographical maps.  The information board noted that this trail requires more rescues than any other trail in the park.

The trail to the second overlook, where we would have gone, looked pretty tough and was estimated at an hour’s time (minimum) to hike.  We just didn’t have the energy for that level of hiking for another hour or more.  Darn!  The information on the board said there is controversy over whether this formation was created by volcanic activity or by an impact.  Current opinion leans toward an impact.  This would have been amazing to see!

My lesson for today was botanical.  One of the trees growing in this area is the two-needle pine.  Look carefully at the needles in the picture–each one is paired at its base with a twin.  Cool!

Fun fact of the day:  It looked like Mickey Mouse was visiting Canyonlands too.

Before leaving the park just before sunset, Ted and I took time to sit on a rock (there were a lot of them in the park) and admire the view while we ate a snack.  A nice ending to our day in Canyonlands.

A shadow selfie.

Ted and I spent today in Arches National Park–number four on our tour of Utah’s Mighty 5®.  The park has over 2,000 arches (if the visitor center information is accurate), but nearly all of them must be insignificant or inaccessible, because only 19 are identified on the NPS map of the scenic road and trails in the park.  Speaking of trails, there seem to be only two kinds of trails in Arches NP:  easy trails that are a mile or less in length; or strenuous trails that are three miles or longer.  A few trails are described as “primitive.”  These trails are not necessarily difficult or long, but are marked only by rock cairns.  Hikers are encouraged to look carefully, as the trails might be difficult to find in some places.

You can see the rocks lining the primitive trail in the center of the picture.  This is the trailhead.  I assume the number of rock markers decreased as the trail went on.

The only strenuous trail we considered would have taken us to Delicate Arch–the poster arch of Utah (it’s on the license plates).  We would have trekked the three miles without shade (it was only in the upper 60s) and the 480-foot elevation increase, but then we found out there are ledges and were told, “If you can make the ledges, you can make it.”  The word ledges convinced us to settle for the trail that let us view that arch from a distance.  It would have been nice to be right up next to the poster child of the park like the people we could see over there, but we know our limits.

This is as close as we got to Delicate Arch, and it’s a zoom-in shot.  The arch is 60 feet tall.  You can see tiny people to the left and right of it.

Arches NP is different from the other places we’ve been visiting.  It has the now-familiar-to-us eroded red rock formations, but they seem to jut up out of the ground at random, rather than filling a large space.

This is a close-knit group of individually jutting rocks.  In most of the park, the rock formations are relatively widely scattered.   The center formation includes Turret Arch.  (Seek and ye shall find.  You can see the purple mountains through it.)

This is a very large isolated rock fin.  Isn’t it odd that so much land around it would erode and leave an obviously harder piece of rock like this to stand alone?

Here are some more isolated rock formations. Guess which one is named Balanced Rock.

North and South Window arches were pretty, and they were fun too.  We climbed through each of the Windows to the other side.

This is the South Window.

The North Window has a pretty view through it.

When you look at the Windows together, they look like eyes with a big nose between them.  All they need is a pair of dark-rimmed glasses and a mustache.

This good-looking couple keeps appearing in our pictures.  As we were walking on the trail, an Asian lady going in the opposite direction apparently told her husband (in Asian-speak) to take our picture, because he stopped us and said he would take our picture.

Turret Arch was near the Windows and was an interesting arch.

Turret Arch looks like this from the trail.  We climbed over the rocks to the other side of it.  You can see other people climbing through too.  Look for the pink T-shirt to find them.

This is what Turret Arch looks like on the other (sunny) side.

If you see Turret Arch in shadow, the rocks surrounding the opening seem to signal A-OK.

Sand Dune Arch was an easy walk–0.3 miles round trip.  The trail was deep sand, so it was like walking on a beach.  A lot of little kids were making sand angels and sand piles.  Too bad there wasn’t any water available to make red sand castles.

This is the entrance to the Sand Dune Arch area. That’s Ted wriggling through it.

And here’s Sand Dune Arch rising over its sandy “beach.”

Our final arch of the day was Double Arch, the highest and third widest arch in the park.

The sign at the trailhead was a little confusing.  Three openings in a double arch?  Define “double,” please.

Double Arch lived up to the NPS description of “spectacular.”  Ted and I chose it as our poster arch of the day.

Tomorrow:  Number 5 of Utah’s Mighty 5®–Canyonlands National Park.

Capitol Reef National Park was today’s trip highlight.  To reach the park, we had to drive Utah Scenic Byway 24–not a hardship.  After leaving the park, we drove Scenic Byway 95 to get to Moab for tomorrow’s hiking in Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.  Basically, it’s the old “you can’t get there from here” thing if you want to go east from Capitol Reef to Moab, because there are no east-west roads through the rocks and canyons.  To get 100 miles east of Capitol Reef, we took Scenic Byway 95 130 miles southeast, then Utah SH 191 125 miles northeast to Moab.  It was a  beautiful drive so, again, no hardship.  Scenic Byway 95 was dedicated in 1976, so it is also called the “Bicentennial Highway.”  Whatever its name, it was a pretty drive.

Here’s a typical scene from Scenic Byway 24.

Near the end of Scenic Byway 24, we drove through Luna Mesa.  These pictures show how easy it was to name this area.

Scenic Byways 24 and 95 meet at Hanksville, UT.  Since it’s the intersection of two state highways, there are three gas stations at the corner.  This one was the most interesting.

The owner had a convenience store-sized hole blasted into this rock formation and built his store inside the rock.

There’s a rock wall separating the store from the rest room area–probably for structural support.  The attendant told me they never heat or cool the store because the rock provides good insulation.  All they need is a fan to keep the air circulating.

After the Hollow Mountain gas station, we started our journey on Scenic Byway 95.

We saw this curved wall of rock along Scenic Byway 95.

This is Lake Powell, a reservoir on the Colorado River in Utah’s Glen Canyon.  We are at a turnout on Scenic Byway 95.  The road then goes downward to the left, around rock formations and mesas, and eventually crosses the bridge you can only see if you zoom the photo and look hard for the blur.  The bridge is silver and it’s at the far end of the visible water.  It took us about a half hour to get from this point to that bridge.

Glen Canyon was probably the prettiest part of the scenic byways today.  Here’s a scene from a rest stop in Glen Canyon on Scenic Byway 95.

At this point, it was probably highway construction that created a pillar beside the large rock.  An arm of Lake Powell is on the right.

Capitol Reef is a beautiful national park.  I learned that it was formed by a huge mountain-building event.  The rock to the west of the buried fault was uplifted 7,000 feet higher than the rock to the east of the fault.  As layers of strata accumulated on the rock, the pressure of the overlying strata folded the rock layers over the fault.  Erosion exposed the strata, and the result is the rock formations we see today.

Ted and I narrowed our photos of the day down from nearly 100 to the ones you see in this post.  Every rock formation in the park and along the byways seemed worthy of a photo, even though they all shared many common characteristics.  I don’t know the names of the rock formations (or if they have names), but I believe the first one below this paragraph is called “Capitol Dome,” for obvious reasons.

We saw an interesting tree as we were driving through the park.  I assume that, given the altitude and the color of the leaves, it’s a member of the aspen family, but I’m not a botanist.  Maybe one of my attentive readers can provide positive identification of the tree genus.  I noticed it because the bark was unusually formed.

Ted and I have now visited three of Utah’s Mighty 5®:  Zion, Bryce, and Capitol Reef.  Tomorrow, we’ll visit the last two:  Canyonlands and Arches.  We visited the first three in the early 2000s, but have never been to the last two.  The weather looks great for the hikes we’ve planned for the next two days.

It’s Ted’s and my second day of Utah’s “best week of our lives,” and the catch-phrase is living up to its name.  We had a beautiful day of scenery from start to finish.  We began on Utah’s Highway 12, an All-American Road, that took us to Bryce Canyon National Park and to Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument.

Highway 12, an All-American Road

To be recognized by the USDOT as a National Scenic Byway, a road must have one or more of six intrinsic significant qualities:  archeological, cultural, historic, natural, recreational, and/or scenic.  To be designated as an All-American Road, the road must go through a nomination/ approval process and must already be recognized as a state scenic byway.  In addition, it must possess at least two of the significant qualities listed; it must have features that do not exist elsewhere in the U.S.; and its features and qualities must be important enough to be a tourist destination in itself (i.e., driving the road must be the goal, like the Pacific Coast Highway).

Highway 12 begins just west of Bryce Canyon NP and ends at Torrey, UT, 40 miles east of Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument.

Utah State Highway 12 meets the All-American Road qualifications in every possible way.  Every time we went around a curve, there was another photo-worthy view.  Luckily, there’s not room to pull off the road except in designated areas, or we’d probably still be driving it and remarking on its scenery.  The road goes up and down and curves around mountains, canyons, and plateaus.  Curves are plentiful and speed limits are necessarily low, so it’s not a quick drive, but who would want to hurry past this kind of scenery?  We don’t think there was a straightaway longer than one-half mile the entire 123-mile length of the highway.  We highly recommend this road as a tourist destination.  Here are a select few of the beautiful views on Highway 12.

The scenery at the west end of Hwy. 12 looks similar to Bryce Canyon, with red hoodoos.  It keeps changing along the road.  This is just east of Bryce Canyon.

Even farther north and east, the mountains become higher and denser.

Another beautiful curve.

Red rocks everywhere.  Gorgeous in the sunlight and even better at sunset.

We came to the end of Highway 12 at sunset.  Still beautiful.

Bryce Canyon National Park

The last time Ted and I visited Bryce Canyon (October, early 2000s), it was cold and had nine inches of snow.  Only a few miles of the park road were plowed and open.  We have stunning pictures of the red rocks of Bryce Canyon sprinkled with evergreen trees and topped with white snow.  Today it was sunny, clear, and in the 50s, so we took some different, but still stunning, pictures of Bryce Canyon.  This time, we drove the roads we were unable to access last time and we thought these views were even more beautiful.

The end of the road in Bryce Canyon is at 9,600 feet elevation, so I started the day with a cup of hot chocolate.  It came in a Christmas-themed cup.

Snow poles were placed along the road and in the parking lots.  Judging by how tall they are, Bryce must get some incredible snowfalls.

The tall, thin, spire-shaped rocks that rise from the dry basin of Bryce Canyon are called hoodoos.  They are also referred to as tent rocks, fairy chimneys, and/or earth pyramids.

Ted and I voted this to be the most spectacular view of Bryce.  It’s called “Natural Bridge,” but is really an arch.  The people in the second picture below are also spectacular.  Or at least the view behind them is.

Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument

Grand Staircase is not actually a staircase or anything that looks like one.  It’s a term used to describe the cliffs, slopes and terraces extending 150 miles northward, from the Grand Canyon to the top of Bryce Canyon–a rise in elevation of more than 6,000 feet.  The topographic layers have different colors and, as they erode, these layers and colors appear in the canyons.

Highway 12 runs through Escalante National Monument.  Ted and I had low expectations of Escalante, NM because it is widely known for its huge plateau (1.9 million acres in the park) and for its dinosaur fossils.  What a wonderful surprise to discover that Escalante is the most beautiful 28-mile stretch of Highway 12.  The road in the first picture below is Highway 12.  On the right (where we were headed), it’s high; then it winds and drops through the center and left of the picture.  (Note:  That’s one of the few straight portions of Highway 12.)

Tomorrow:  the third day of the best week of our lives.

Las Vegas:  city of excess.  If it can be overdone, I’m sure the Las Vegas Strip area has overdone it.  Still, the energy of the Strip has a magnetic attraction for tourists, including Ted and me.

The last time we were here (late 1990s), we set aside some money to play the slot machines, only to discover that the one-armed bandits had long since given way to putting a credit card in a slot and pushing a button.  That didn’t seem like much fun, so we spent our gambling allowance on a high-end dinner instead.

Slot machines.  No one-arm bandits.

Players at tables where Ted and I are not gambling.

Dealers waiting for us to take our place at their tables.  Still waiting.

This time, we decided we’d skip the gambling in favor of buying tickets to whatever show interested us and had available seats.  Our choice was Elton John, but he is only performing on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and we’re only here on Sunday and Monday nights.  Apparently, our message to EJ didn’t get through.  We tried to pick another show, but nothing really interested us at the given prices.  Tickets cost $150-$200 each–and that was for the “medium” seating area, dropping to around $100 where binoculars are needed, and going up to $200-300 to sit anywhere closer.  That was too much for a performance we were settling for just for the sake of seeing a performance.  We opted for the same thing as last time:  we used our ticket money for two high-end dinners instead.  The food was out of this world and much better than a “settled for” show.

Here’s the first restaurant we chose in place of a show (Prime, on the lower level, center of the photo).  It overlooked the pool with the Bellagio fountains.  A beautiful show!

This is the second restaurant we spent our ticket money on.  This time, the show was watching the chef and his helpers prepare the diners’ meals.

Temperatures were above normal (90 degrees), so daytime walking on the Strip was not that much fun, even it if is a dry heat.  We waited for the heat of the sun to dissipate, then did the Strip-walk until dinner time.  People-watching on the Strip is a tourist attraction in itself.  I made Ted promise to never dress like an older man we saw while we were eating lunch:  sandals with navy and white polka-dot socks, green plaid shorts, and a red polo shirt.  Eeewww!  That was hard on the eyes!  As we strolled down the Strip, Ted was offered several opportunities for entertainment tonight.

Decisions, decisions.  Ted decided to have dinner with me instead.  Aww, how sweet!

We’re staying at the Bellagio, and the decorations are gorgeous.

This glass-flowered skylight ceiling was one of our memories of the last time we were here.

The Bellagio has five huge pools, plus several hot tubs and lots of cabanas, as seen from our 16th story room.  Quite a few people were trying to keep cool in the pools this afternoon.

Here’s the nighttime view from our hotel window.

The hotel decorations are fall-themed.  This hallway featured over-sized, colorful peacocks.

The peacocks’ tails were made out of flowers–just like the floats in the Rose Bowl parade.

Another seasonal decoration covered with flowers.

And one more Hallowe’en guy with flower-based construction.

The Bellagio is not the place to look for cheap souvenirs, although the usual mugs, T-shirts, and sweatshirts are plentiful.  There is an entire wing of designer shopping.

Some hotel ceiling decorations and the entrance to the Via Bellagio–the upscale shopping area.

Dior, Prada, Gucci–you name it and there was a store.  Unfortunately, I didn’t see anything I liked, and neither did anyone else.  Whenever we walked by, there were no customers in any of these stores–only salespeople.

Finally!  Harry Winston had a bracelet I’d like to wear.  I inquired, but decided not to buy when the salesman said “$30,000.”

The lights on the Strip have become brighter (LEDs now) and more numerous, but the Bellagio fountains are just as beautiful as we remember.

It’s the Las Vegas Strip, not Paris, France, but you knew that.

A passerby offered to immortalize this moment for us.  (The bracelet I’m wearing cost less than $30,000.)

Aaahhh, the Bellagio fountains.

We didn’t stay up all night to verify it, but I’m sure that, like New York City, this town never sleeps.  Things will be much quieter for us in Zion National Park tomorrow.

Last night in Flagstaff (elev. 7,000 ft.), the temperature dropped to 26 degrees.  Luckily, we were in bed and, when we went out into the morning sunshine, it was already in the low 50s–much nicer.

We drove from Flagstaff to Las Vegas today, which included crossing the Hoover Dam.  It’s been many years since we visited Hoover Dam, so we decided to stop again and check it out.

The dam still looks the same, and the water level in Lake Mead is still low, but the café has expanded, the number of visitor tours has expanded, rest rooms have been added along the pedestrian walkway, and the visitor center has its own building.  In addition, there are now 12 parking lots, so the number of visitors must have increased greatly.  Even at closing time, when we arrived, we had to troll the parking lots to find an empty spot.

The biggest change was the re-routing of US 93.  It used to cross the dam; now there’s a new bridge that takes US 93 over the tailrace of the dam.  Naturally, security has been added, so we had to stop to let the guards decide that we were not a threat before we could drive to the actual dam.  We passed.  We arrived too late in the afternoon for a tour, but the parking was free, which saved us $10.

The new Hoover Dam Visitor Center is on the left.

These sculptures have been added on the NV side of the dam.  There is also a larger-than-life sculpture of a dam builder working on the dam in a safety harness, but I couldn’t get a good picture of it.

This is the beginning of Lake Mead, the reservoir immediately behind Hoover Dam.  The top of the white rock is a high water mark.  If I remember correctly from our previous visit, life is good when the water level covers the lower portion of the intake towers on the left.  When it’s low like this, there’s a drought going on.

Here’s the selfie of us at Hoover Dam.

This is the new US 93 bridge over the tailrace.

Ted and I spent today at the Grand Canyon.  Last week we visited Palo Duro Canyon, just south of Amarillo, TX–the second largest canyon in the U.S.  It is definitely a distant second to the Grand Canyon.  As my brother Tom said, “There are many canyons, but only one is Grand.”  It was a beautiful, sunny, calm day.  We were at an altitude of about 7,000 feet, so it was cool, but we had jackets, so temperatures in the 50s were no big deal.

We spent most of our time walking on the south Rim Trail.  At one point, we saw people on burros at the bottom of the canyon, nearly 6,000 feet below us.  A man with binoculars found them and pointed them out.  With the naked eye, you could only see them if you knew where to look because, at that distance, they were tiny dots that moved along one of the trails.

One part of the Rim Trail is called the “Trail of Time.”  It’s a 2.83-mile-long interpretive geographical timeline, and has received national recognition.  (It sounds self-congratulatory for a national park trail to receive national recognition, doesn’t it?)  The displays along the trail are well done and include rock samples from each layer of the Canyon walls, set at appropriate markers along the time line.  Basically, the trail is a short course in geology.  In fact, a high school class was walking the trail for a field trip.  Each meter of the trail equals one million years of geologic history, and there are markers set into the trail at every meter to mark the time.  The trail begins at “today” and ends at 4,560 million years.

Start walking the Trail of Time here.

Pause here, a million years ago.

Congratulate yourself here before walking the next two billion years of the Grand Canyon’s geology.  The Canyon is “only” 6 million years old, but the trail continues for 4,560 million years–the age of the earth’s geological development.

We also listened to an NPS Ranger Talk about the geology of the Canyon.  He said that real geologists would hate him for simplifying the development of the Grand Canyon to the word you say when you first see it:  DUDE.

D for deposition–the soil deposited in the Grand Canyon that later turned to rock.

U for uplift–the movement of the tectonic plates that raised the Grand Canyon.

D for down–what the river did to the rock:  wear it down.

E for erosion–what wind and water have done to the rock.

Why didn’t the Colorado River go around the mountains during the “D” portion of the Canyon’s development (wearing it down)?  Because the river had the right of way, so it cut right through them.

Of course, we took a lot of pictures and they all show beautiful (grand) views.  Here are a few of our favorites.

I like the color contrasts in this photo.  The brown in the sky is smoke from a nearby prescribed burn.

Again, the colors of the different rock layers make this a beautiful place to visit.

This was a very deep/steep area.  Of course, depth never shows very well in photos but the rock formations are interesting.

We stayed until the sun was setting.  All the colors became more golden and red, and the shadows grew larger.

Another great day together for Ted and me.

We arrived in Grand Canyon Village late this afternoon, checked into our hotel, and searched the internet for restaurants and restaurant reviews.  The results were, as our President would say, “sad.”

We checked reviews for about 10 restaurants–steak houses, pizza parlors, and family dining.  No matter which restaurant we were checking, the reviews were terrible.  Even worse, they were similar for every restaurant:  the food was overpriced; everything tasted terrible (dry, overcooked, or even as if it was out of a can); the service was extremely slow (30-90 minute waits for the food); and it wasn’t worth the time or money.  A number of people even qualified their reviews by saying they have never reviewed a restaurant online, but this one (whichever it was) was so bad, something had to be said.

Almost unanimously, the reviewers mentioned that the food would have been better and, although still overpriced because they were taking advantage of the captive tourist market, more reasonably priced at McDonald’s or Wendy’s.  McDonald’s was two doors down from our hotel.  Here’s a picture of our dinner tonight.

The food was overpriced (captive tourists); everything tasted like it always does at McDonald’s; service was fast (about a two-minute wait); and we were satisfied.