Hawaii, etc.

Well, I'm back. Quite well-rested and very overfed. Given the calories I consumed during the last week, I shouldn't be eating for a week!
We gave ourselves a send-off before the cruise by having an early Thanksgiving dinner at Caroline's place. And yes, that is the back of my head after Megan got through French-braiding my hair. As some of you know, I've always wanted a ponytail, but never had one even during my misspent youth. So now I'm growing one in my misspent retirement. This is a look at our floating home for a week, Norwegian Line's Pride of America. It's quite the feat of engineering and organization. It's like a small city, with it's own power plant, water and sewage systems, and even telephone and cable. For this trip, it was home to around 3000 cruisers and 1000 crew.


Our first stop was in Maui. We went into town for a walk, and came across this concert of Hawaiian music and dance. This was the real thing - performed for the locals and not for tourists. It was very entertaining. The white guy, the leader of the group, had a great voice, as well as looking a lot like Sarah's old friend Ryan.

This dancer was fascinating to watch. The moves all seemed quite simple, but they were graceful and somehow fascinating to watch. Also fascinating, and very beautiful, were the flowers in her hair.Our next stop was the Haleakala crater at sunset. At an elevation of about 10000 feet, it was a cold, beautiful and very foreign landscape. Our viewpoint was above the Haleakala observatory complex. As well as a variety of telescopes, this is also the American center for tracking all the manmade junk and debris orbiting the earth.

On our last day in Hawaii, we rented a car and took a quick tour of the island. Here we are with Mom on the North Shore, not far from Sunset Beach. The surf was pretty incredible. It's hard to imagine going into that stuff voluntarily.

This is a shot of Mom taking on a sugar cane plantation tour on Kauai. Here are Mom and Marian in full cruising mode.

Probably the most interesting part of the trip was cruising past lava flows on the Big Island into the ocean at night. We were quite a ways off shore, but it was pretty spectacular nonetheless. There wasn't enough light for conventional pictures, but this video should give you some idea of what it was like. One thing the video can't convey is the smell of sulphur we got as we passed downwind of the lava flows. Neat stuff!