July 2006

Most of tonight’s work was already done over the weekend so I was able to scan through the photos from Day 6, easily the best batch of the trip. At this point there are only 356 left through which I have to sort.

Our day began with a stop at the South Kona Fruit Stand (pictured above), and that really set the tone for the entire day. We spent the rest of the morning eating fresh fruit while first driving to South Point, the southernmost tip of the United States, and then while seeking out a secluded beach. The elusive Green Sand Beach is a two hour hike from the nearest paved road, or a mere 20 minutes of off-roading; naturally, we chose the latter. Because we started the day bright and early we were lucky enough to arrive while it was still relatively deserted — there were only four other people and a dog on the beach.

We spent close to two hours sunning, reading, gorging ourselves on fruit, and bodysurfing what were easily the best waves of the entire trip. The best part was that we were the only people around for miles. As the hikers and wayward drivers started to filter in after a while, we realized we should be going anyway if we wanted to squeeze in a coffee tour before our luau at 5 p.m.

It’s a good thing we left when we did because we spent the bulk of our afternoon navigating ourselves out of Southern Hawaii. The map indicated there were roads to the east that were more substantial than the ones on which we came, so we figured the GPS and our own intuition would be enough to keep us on the right trails long enough to find a different exit. Boy, were we wrong…. Miles of barely drivable dirt road all in a vain attempt at saving ourselves 20 minutes of our time. Instead, we added two full hours to our drive time and a lot of nerve-wracking backtracking. Although we at least had our inexhaustible pile of exotic fruit to keep us entertained. It wasn’t until we made at least three wrong turns that we finally made it to a paved road and at that point still another 60 miles to our hotel.

Miraculously, we made it out with enough time to take a quick tour at a coffee plantation and still shower before our luau. We arrived for dinner just in time and had the rest of the evening to talk about our vacation and remember all the fun we had before our flights the next morning — Steve’s to L.A. for a visit with his friend Eric, ours to Maui and another three days in paradise.

I pushed myself harder than usual Friday night and went beyond this batch of photos. As a result I ended up burning out before I got the chance to post any at all. These next few should be that much easier for the extra work, as Dia was with me as I was able to weed out the duds and even named a few of the keepers.

Day Five was spent on the other side of the island near the other major city, Hilo. Some people call it the “rainy side” for the obvious reasons; I call it the side of the island where we should have stayed. Kona is prettier, smaller, and has the better weather for sure, but it’s so far from everything I wanted to see that it made a lousy base of operations.

So, we spent a lot of time in the car as we drove to various places and once again didn’t return home until after nightfall. The day got off to a rocky start when I flipped out at all the missed turns, back seat driving, and otherwise good-natured joking, but once we got that out of the way and I settled down it was a lovely drive through the generally overcast landscape. It really is too bad the pictures don’t do it all justice. The thick carpet of clouds didn’t make it any less bright outside, but the skies in every shot threw the contrast off — so much that no amount of adjusting could fix the pictures and make them representative of what I remember seeing.

The most memorable part of the day was our first off-road experience. I was so thrilled when I first saw the sign prohibiting vehicles without four-wheel drive that I immediately squashed any talk of parking and walking down — this was exactly why I rented a Jeep in the first place. However, it was when we first approached a river crossing that I became ecstatic. Steve and Dia were a little nervous at first because the crossing was wide enough to give us and the other drivers pause; in fact, the Japanese tourists in front of us had pulled over as if they’d reached an actual destination. The facts that the road continued on the other side of the river and we were merely in front of someone’s house with no view of the waterfall we were trying to reach led us to push forward. I looked back at Alex and with his surreptitious nod as a final blessing I took us right into the water.

It ended up being the fourth crossing that finally turned us around, and without even seeing that waterfall. There was never any guarantee that the road led to anything other than private property so the risk was too great to push our luck. If anything, it gives me a reason to go back and try it again. The hardest part at one spot was simply finding the road; we were convinced we had reached a dead end until a truck came speeding by and showed us that we had to turn upstream for a few yards before the road opened up on the other side. (The photo above was taken on our way back across one of the rivers. It’s easy to see how we could have doubted the existence of a road here, which is off to the right.)

The other part of this valley’s exploration led us to another waterfall near a park by the river’s mouth. We spent half an hour walking around and marveling at the dark sand and the beauty of it all. It was the first time I’ve seen a river empty right into the ocean — in my experience it’s always been a river that has widened into a bay or channel first. The mixture of salt water, waves, babbling brook, sand and rocks all in a lush valley was a lot to take in, even a little dizzying.

We continued our drive along the countryside to Hilo, stopping to look at waterfalls and bridges along the way. We also visited the depressing site where an April 1, 1946 tsunami wiped out a schoolhouse and killed around 20 children who were in school at the time. One small boy was washed out to sea where he used his boy scout training to build a small raft and even save two other children before they were rescued by helicopter a day later.

Our final destination was a naturally-heated, oceanside pond that was a little hard to reach, mainly because someone built a gated community on two of its sides. The forth side was “protected” by a mile of rocky road that snaked around piles of sharp volcanic rocks. We followed it in as the sun was setting and it grew dark before we were able to determine if we reached it or not. We saw a cove lined with houses but it was too dark to bust out our bathing suits and swim around to be sure. One more thing to go back and visit, I guess. The real adventure began 15 minutes after we arrived as we were all hesitant to travel back the way we came. Instead, it was supposedly possible — at least at one point — to exit through the gated community. We took the Jeep down the first flat area between two mounds of volcanic rock that could pass for a road and followed it knowing that we might very well be adding to our problems if we had to ultimately turn around.

We soon came to a chain linked between two posts barring our exit. It was too dark at this point to go exploring the paths without getting lost, so I was determined to get through. I hopped out to see if it was possible to unhook the chain or maybe even break it but, sure enough, the chain was wrapped around a metal handle and secured with a padlock. Never one to back away from a good puzzle, I looked to see what was holding the handle to the post, and it turned out to be nothing more than two bolts. The first was so well lubricated that it came right off, now if I could just twist that second one…. It was stuck fast. I tried to use two rocks as gripping tools but none of them were flat and they were sharp enough to cut my hand. I went back to the car to let everyone know what I was trying to do and to see what we had with us in the way of tools. Every response I received was less than supportive. I guess it was understandable since we were essentially trying to break into a gated community with our headlights shining directly toward the back of several houses, but at the time I was determined to not drive through the rock fields at night. So I was steadfast and refused to yield to the negativity.

Instead, I asked where I could find the jack and its accompanying lug wrench. After a minute or two we were able to yank the wrench from under the passenger seat, and I went into the headlights on the off chance that I could loosen the remaining bolt. Lo and behold, it actually worked. With a satisfying shout and a goofy grin on my face I tossed the handle with one end of the chain across the road and we were officially out of the rock garden from hell. We drove along the road for a little while before it simply ended in a patch of grass. Before anyone could raise objections (beyond the muttering and doubting that had become constant for the past 15 minutes) I gunned the engine over the grass, across a small ditch, and over a curb. With the satisfying hum of Gated Community Asphalt under our tires, we made for the exit and headed home.

It was the single most thrilling moment of my entire vacation, and one of the most satisfying of my entire life. Sadly, we were in too much of a hurry to take pictures of our illicit exit but pictures from the rest of the day are linked here.

This latest group of photos are my favorite. I’m still amazed that there’s a place in this country where people can go to see an active volcano. Even cooler is the fact that there used to be a road right along the shore at one point and it was completely destroyed by lava; walking along the rocks for a mile and coming across a patch of pavement with a road sign next to it is really neat. And when Dia and I looked up — while walking to the lava flows — to see a full Hawaiian rainbow stretching across the ocean we were absolutely floored. There really isn’t anything much prettier than that.

The final equation ended up being 147 raw → 72 final → 34 distinct enough to post. Even though I’m extremely pleased there were a few shots it pained me to toss. Blinking and blurriness are often my biggest problems, along with the occasional roll of fat or really terrible facial expression. Then there’s always getting bitten by expecting to come across a particular shot only to finally remember finally that it was taken with someone else’s camera.

These are also the first that I would have been excited to see published in a larger format. Rest assured, it’s always at the back of my mind to devise a method of enlarging the photos (once I have some free time).

So here it is, a direct link to the best group of photos so far (including one of my all-time favorite shots of my wife).

There aren’t a lot of photos from our first inter-island travel day as we spent the morning in taxis and planes and most of our sightseeing time underwater. While processing the 41 shots I took, I noticed something: Alex is always smiling when I have the camera pointed in his direction; I don’t think I ever caught him without one, at least on this trip. I would have had a much easier time if Dia and Steve were as gleeful as he was.

I kept only a small amount from this batch since most of them were taken while I was testing different settings with which to capture the sunset. It didn’t even matter in the end because I just bumped the contrast to lose a lot of the foreground detail anyway. Also noteworthy is the “Planning Ahead” image — the Steve in that picture is from a different shot and was digitally added almost seamlessly in about 10 minutes.

Link to the beginning of Day 3.

I spent only about an hour on photos tonight. There was one close call when iPhoto crashed and I was afraid it would choose to forget the edits I had made, fortunately none of my time was wasted. There were only 84 pictures from our second day in Oahu; I tossed about half and posted 25 of the keepers to the online photo album.

The second day was spent all over Oahu, though the majority of my pictures are from our morning at Pearl Harbor. The line was incredibly long, but it moved fast and it ended up being worth the 45 minutes in line to avoid getting up before dawn. The memorial at sea is quite depressing and occasionally I get close to tears just thinking about it. Hopefully some of my shots capture just how moving the experience was.

The rest of the day we drove around the island with Jeff as our guide. We ate at our first fast-food style sushi restaurant with a conveyor belt where our checks were calculated by the colors and number of plates we had at the end of our meal. From there we headed to the north end of the island to one of its more secluded beaches; the waves weren’t terribly great and it was a little windy, but it was one of the nicest beaches I had ever seen. On the way back to Honolulu we took a different route through a mountain pass and saw a breathtaking view of the beach where we were just swimming. We didn’t stay long since we were sandy and exhausted and it was a virtual wind tunnel up there, so soon we were on our way back to the hotel to shower and change for dinner out on the town.

Regrettably, I don’t have pictures of that night’s dinner at the Kobe Japanese Steakhouse or karaoke with the Gidlunds afterwards, but the entire night was an incredible amount of fun.

Here’s a link to the start of the second day’s photos. I might be tooting my own horn a little here, but I like how the titles and timestamps provide just enough information for me to avoid having to write captions.

Not a smooth undertaking, this photo process of mine. Thankfully I’m tackling this little by little so I can work out the kinks in small batches: fixing timestamps, cropping, titling, retouching. I haven’t even gotten to any hardcore editing yet (just a simple swap of my head in the “Gruesome Foursome” photo).

I’m not adding a link from my photo page until the album is complete, but I intend to stay true to my word and process about 100 pictures and post the best every day for the next week or so. As I mentioned, the going is slow. I realized only after I did a fair amount of editing that I forgot to batch change my timestamps, something that iPhoto doesn’t do; I have another program for that but if it’s not taken care of before everything is imported, then they have to be changed manually. Since I only worked with the first 57 photos it wasn’t a big deal, until I realized that my camera’s clock was two hours behind, so I miscalculated and had to readjust every single one a second time. I’m now in the process of deleting all the other pictures, fixing their timestamps on the camera card, and reimporting them. I just wish it didn’t render all the rotating I did yesterday useless.

Then there’s the fact that I’m losing heart after seeing the photographs themselves. There are a few with which I am happy, but my fears about the harsh Hawaiian sun and its counterpart the occasional overcast sky have me feeling a little disappointed about some of the shots I was looking forward to seeing. Weddings are also problematic; there’s a reason people hire a professional photographer and that person will always have the best shots so I hate even trying to compete. This time, however, I got swept up in the vacation-with-digital-camera craze and forgot my rule about not taking wedding photos. The result? Every shot I have of Jeff and Madoka also has at least two other people in it, many of them right in the center background — between the happy couple — taking the same shot in reverse. I’m taking a little consolation in knowing that I ruined just as many pictures by being in theirs, too (not the professional’s shots of course, just the amateurs’). Some of mine were fixed with a little cropping here and there, nothing major but a pain nonetheless.

At any rate, Day 1 is up for everyone’s viewing pleasure.

The plan was to process at least the first day’s worth of photos from our trip this morning. I even got a head start at the movies last night (we went to see Clerks II, which was very funny by the way) when I was able to delete at least 50 pictures after only reviewing them on the camera. Anyway, I slept in and then watched three episodes of Desperate Housewives this afternoon instead.

I imported everything overnight and it basically took me an hour just to go through and rotate the vertical shots (one of the few features I miss about my old camera). There’s a lot to work with here, and tomorrow I’ll at least have the first two days taken care of. One good thing about grouping photos according to day and processing them that way will be that I might have a chance to post some comments instead of merely letting the titles fill in the blanks.