The Post You've All Been Waiting For

Ok, vicarious vacationers, here it comes. I'll try to keep the descriptions brief. We had a very nice time, no one got a sunburn, and we ate lots of fresh, locally caught fish.

The volcano on the island of Hawai'i was going off, so we had lots of mellow, overcast days. They call it "vog" there- volcanic fog.

Sorry, no pictures of us surfing-- who would hold the camera? We had so much fun doing it that I am devising a plan to take surf lessons before the year is out. Somewhere warm...

My friend Kristin's husband Ken nailed it when they caught me buying mangos at Trader Joe's the day we got back: I am still in tropical denial. I bought a pineapple and some mangos that day, and I have only put on shoes other than flip-flops to go to the gym. I think by tomorrow I should be back to normal.

One of the many cool flowers and plants seen from the lanai of the house in Kealakekua, on the Big Island. Avocados practically dripped from the trees, pineapples ripened on their...um, pineapple bushes (?) and one day Mike found a just-fallen coconut in the yard, husked it, cracked it, and we shared the flesh and juice. Brightly-colored geckos hid in the cracks in the deck, coming out to sun in the afternoon. Breakfast and a couple of dinners were eaten on the lanai, surrounded by the rainforest.


Sign and tiki from Miloli'i, "the last Hawai'ian fishing village" which was the subject of an Israel Kamakawiwo'ole song. The tin-roofed town sits on the blackened rock of a lava flow. Mike and I drove down to see the beach on a Sunday, and families were having barbecues at home. We felt like stupid tourists, intruding on their privacy ("Excuse me, but can you tell me where the nearest Starrrrbucks is?) so we drove quietly out.

How teeny is this gecko? Soooo teeny! Just thinking about him makes me talk in a tiny voice.


Mmmm. Mmmm. Poke! This is my absolute favorite thing to eat when I am in Hawai'i. Raw ahi, green onion, soy and seaweed. I like the cucumber and white onion variety best, but the fish above was particularly fresh and beautiful.

My, that's a smoking caldera you have there...


The radically diverse microclimates of Volcanoes National Park above.

This is a piko puka. ("Pee-koh poo-kah," try to get yer Hawai'ian on.) Piko= "umbilical cord" and puka= "hole". (People who remember the 80s: puka shells are little shells that have holes in them. Worn by that curly-haired guy from Eight is Enough, and Leif Garrett.) The Hawai'ians believe(d) that the root, or the soul of the person, otherwise known as the umbilical cord, should rest in a special place in order for their offspring to have a fortunate, or long, or good life, so they would trek way, way up on this mountain to a field of flat lava rocks called Pu'uloa, which is now inside Volcanoes National Park, to carve out a special little spot for each one. I didn't get whether this was for the whole umbilical cord, or just the little black bellybutton thing (ew!) that falls off after the baby has fully set and dried.

Each and every hole was carved with another little rock. Some of them are circles within circles, others are in the shapes of animals with circles or dots inside them, and others are just patterns of lines and circles, made by a family, or even generations of a family. There are 23,000 petroglyphs at Pu'uloa, and 16, 000 of them are piko pukas. Sixteen-thousand babies. Sixteen-thousand bellybuttons is a lot of bellybuttons. It's sort of a nice thought though, that the parents would go to all that trouble to make sure their kid got off to a good start.

Big beach, big toes. This is at Big Beach, on Maui, just around the corner from Little Beach, where most people wear no clothes. After a tiger shark bit someone last year at Makena beach, right up the road, I'm less willing to let my freak flag fly in the water over there.

Ahhh, our favorite beach. The view from our lanai at Napili Bay. (When you go to Hawai'i, not only do you have to spell Hawai'i with an okina in it, but you are also required to say lanai a lot. If you fail to say lanai enough, you are sacrificed at a luau.) This is a great little beach, though it can get crowded. I can still feel my feet in the sand and hear the ocean's rhythmic hiss. Aloha!