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diary : february 2007

Wow, too many fun things this month!  The most interesting to most of you would be our week-long vacation on the Big Island of Hawai'i, where I finally got to see a live volcano.  Fitting for a former geologist, huh?  More on our trip below.

Of more interest to me than you was my weekend jaunt to visit sister Stephie & bro-in-law Peter in San Diego.  We ate some fine food (most of which was prepared by master chef Peter), hung out with their big dogs (3 Irish wolfhounds & 2 retired racing greyhounds) and did a mess o' crossword puzzles (they're both addicts.)

The lead singer of my fave band of all time, the Loved Ones, is fronting a new trio that is spectacular, Honeycut.  And I stumbled into a performance -- they unexpectedly opened for one of my other faves, Cake at the UC Berkeley campus.

So more about Hawai'i... the first night, we arrived late, drove through the rain, & stayed at the Volcano House in Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park.  In the morning, we started exploring; How was feeling pretty chipper so we hiked Kilauea Iki (with cool steam vents, big caves, and a rolling, wave-like surface) then drove the Crater Rim Drive, stopping along the way to see big steaming craters and acres of flows, where in some places the ground was hot to the touch!  Our last stop was a couple miles from the active vents, where the roadway ends abruptly in a pile of lava.  We could only see distant steam where the lava was entering the ocean, though apparently at night the show was more intense.

We then drove across the island to Kona and the Hilton Waikoloa Village -- which was quite a trip.  The hotel, I mean, not the ride.  It's huge, sprawling, and has both trams & canal boats to move you around the facility.  I particularly liked the big statues representing all twelve animals of the Chinese calendar.  The whole thing was extraordinarily artificial, but charming non-the-less.  We had fun snorkeling in the man-made cove, even swimming along with the resident sea turtles (note, though the turtles don't like being touched, they move too slowly to successfully bite you -- heh.)

The other big highlight was a station ride I took at Dahana Ranch.  It was sooooo cool.  No nose-to-tail trail ride this; it's a working ranch, there's work to be done, and doggone it -- tourists will pay to do it!  I went with a couple and their two young girls (first clue that this was not going to be too big a challenge for my modest horseman skills).  As we rode out to the Brahman crossbreds, our guide instructed us NOT to stay in a line because the horses, being working beasts, needed to always be reminded to move independently of one another.  So we meandered across the lush, green, rolling hills for about a half hour, 'til we found the grazing cattle.  For the next hour and a half, we moved the cows, bulls, & calves (about a mile?) to their new pasture.  Luckily, I'd recently seen "Brokeback Mountain" and had all my whistles & calls down pat.  The horses knew their jobs well, and even chasing down the errant cud-chewer at a trot was a breeze.  We came across a couple unlucky dead cows, but had fun watching the calves try to nurse while Mom was trying to mosey along.

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