What a crazy long week it's been! I can hardly believe that the last time we posted was actually a week ago. It seems like it was a lot longer than that.
We've had a "cold snap" here, if you could call it that, that has made beach time a little less happening. It's noticeably cooler here, especially the water, and since we didn't "fall back," the sun is setting relatively early. It goes behind the mountains around 5:30 now. I wouldn't call it sunset, but it makes it get pretty dark pretty fast. Right now it's 7:30 and it feels like 10 because it's been dark for so long. The flip side is that I still go to work in the morning light. I don't miss the time change and the cats going nuts over feeding times.
On Wednesday, I decided I needed some beach time, and if you follow Facebook, you already know that I got stung by a jellyfish. It was a Portuguese Man-of-War, which sounds way scarier than it is. Actually, it isn't really a true jellyfish. It's some colony of specialized individuals called zooids. So there you have it. The one that got me wasn't so much a colony as it was just a few floating tentacles on the water. Every once in a while, Stephen and I would get a funky stinging sensation in the water, who knows what from, maybe all that saltiness on a scratch or something, so I didn't think much of the initial sting except that it hit my arms, my left shoulder, and my chest all at the same time. I said to Stephen, "Why am I suddenly prickly all over?" and when I looked at my arm, I saw a tentacle stuck to it. So that did it for our beach time. I ended up with some nice-looking little welts on my arms and over my left shoulder, but even without any treatment, the stinging went down within the hour and I only had a small red mark on my shoulder by the morning. There was really nothing to write home about.
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| Just another view on jellyfish day |
The only other jelly to worry about is the box jelly, and those hurt like no tomorrow and are extremely dangerous. They also don't appear on the Windward side.
On the way back, we saw a snail on top of a much larger snail, so Stephen snapped a picture. It was way cooler than my jellyfish sting, so I thought I would share that picture instead. Yay!
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| Snail on a snail |
Friday was a long day. I had to be at work at 7, played a gig, and then hopped on a plane for the Big Island so we could participate in a Veterans' Day parade the next morning. Two of the guys I'm friends with decided to go for an hour run, which might have been a mistake considering I already did a half-hour run that morning. We got to see a little bit of Hilo that way, but since we didn't even get to our hotel until 5, we couldn't run until 5:30, and it was dark by 6. Oh well. It looked like such a cute little city-town!
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| My roommate and me on our balcony |
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| The view from that balcony |
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| Pre-run selfie |
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| A half-hour later, after rain |
As you can see, it wasn't exactly the nicest day. Kinda overcast and dreary.
One of the guys I work with loves to take selfies. Particularly shirtless ones. But hey, I guess it provides me with more photos to share on the blog, so I guess you'll have to get used to it.
We did not sweat that much. We got rained on. We could actually see the line of rain as we ran into it. I wasn't thrilled about the idea, but the guy leading the run loves to run in the rain, so I guess that's what we did. Yay.
After that, we went to Ken's Pancake House, which I guess is *the* place to go in Hilo. I ordered crab cakes. When in Hawai'i, don't order crab cakes. I would have been better off with the Loco Moco. It was very "Hawaiian style," which means it had a super-thick fried coating on it. I couldn't have recognized the crab in it if I tried. But, my shirtless friend ordered a slice of macadamia nut pie, and THAT was awesome! It was like pecan pie, but lighter and less sweet. Good stuff!
Saturday was the parade day. We got "flower bombed" by Blue Hawaiian helicopters. Right before the parade started, a helicopter flew over us and dropped a bunch of flowers on everybody participating in the parade. The locals were all waving shakas at the helicopter (shaka being the technical term for the "hang loose" hand gesture).
It was a beautiful day for a parade. It was also 85 degrees out and full sunshine, which means we sweated through our uniforms big-time.
When we were done, the military place that fed us breakfast (donuts, some sort of sweet rolls, pineapple, bananas, and... sushi...) also fed us lunch. The girl made crock pots full of kalua pork and shoyu chicken, plus there was still sushi, white rice, corn, and a really good salad with all kinds of greens, broccoli, carrots, olives, and other goodness. I ended up eating two plates this size because we had another community band concert in the evening, and I didn't know with the flights if I was going to have time for dinner. We were done with the parade at 10am, done with lunch at 11am, and our flight didn't leave until 3pm. We were just sitting around, and then our leadership made the smart decision to have us go to the airport early and hang around there since there were at least comfy chairs. As it turned out, they could fly us back on two separate flights earlier, so I ended up only hanging out for an hour and was back in Honolulu around 2:30. I actually had time to finally take a shower and get some real dinner before we had our community band concert!
Yesterday we just tried to catch up on sleep. While I was in Hilo doing the parade (oh, and there were only about 10 people watching because Hawaiians don't care about Veterans Day. Wonder why...??), Stephen had to be up at 4:30am to go do his physical fitness test for the National Guard, do some training, and then play a funeral. He was done just in time to pick me up from work. So yeah, Sunday was all about grocery shopping, catching up on sleep, and cleaning up the apartment. We did find this nightstand on the side of the road:
It was free because it's clearly broken, but we figured just remove the drawer, put a bottom in it (possibly just the drawer bottom) and repaint it. We needed something to hold our little TV outside on the lanai, and nothing comes cheaper than free, so we took it. It was only a street or two up from us, so it was a quick walk down the road. I'm actually really thrilled to get started fixing it up!
Today we actually had our adventure day. We went hiking with my shirtless friend up Ka'au Crater. While we were there, we found some wild lilikoi (passion fruit) and a lot of ripe strawberry guavas. We ate them up! They were so delicious, though, that I'm not sure I can eat lilikoi and guava flavored anything ever again, because those wild fruits were tart like blackberries, and everything else adds so much sugar. We also saw several nice, big waterfalls, but we had to do some serious hiking. It was about five hours overall, and it was some pretty athletic hiking. I've done a grueling hike or two in the past, but a lot of these are maintained by volunteers, not by the park system or the government or anything, so the paths aren't always the clearest or the best maintained. There were ropes tied around rocks and trees where the climb was particularly steep or slippery. People have died on this hike before, but as far as I know, all of them were avid hikers who got too confident and did something less-than-smart, like go farther than was safe or peer over the edge of a waterfall and slip. We were aiming to go to the top, but while the three guys got up a particularly vertical climb without a problem, I decided I was done. As it turned out, only a few feet up, the trail was so eroded that they decided they were done, too, so it's not like I rained on anyone's parade. But seriously, we were on top of one of the ridges, and it was amazing! I never needed food or a nap so much in my life! So now, here are the pictures:
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| The first waterfall we found |
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| Waterfall selfie |
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| Stephen took this picture from the edge |
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| Strawberry guavas |
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| Stephen eating one |
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| Selfie by the waterfalls |
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| View from the ridge at Ka'au Crater |
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| Selfie at the ridge |
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| Another view from the ridge |
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| Us climbing along the ridge |
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| A view of Ka'au Crater. That's Diamondhead off to the left in the background |
So, needless to say we had a really good time. The four of us got lunch at Whole Foods in Honolulu, where I got some really good sushi because Honolulu is basically Japanland. After that, we were super tired, so it was all naps and sitting on the couch and doing nothing else interesting, and that was fine by me. Stephen and I both have to work tomorrow, and I'm working on Wednesday, but then we have a funky set of weekends coming up because we didn't get our military weekend off the way everybody else in the Pacific Fleet did. We will definitely have some more adventures coming up!
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