Thanks for nothing, Pete...

My blogging was temporarily delayed because Rick needed to write up a three-page paper for the class he's taking this semester. It had to be emailed to the professor yesterday afternoon, before class time, because apparently "I'm on vacation in Hawaii" is NOT a good enough excuse for not turning in your homework. Even when you're on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific, you're supposed to do your homework. (Well THAT doesn't seem fair, does it?) And my blogging was further delayed by an extremely slow internet connection last night -- I was attempting to post something, and I finally gave up because I couldn't even get the Blogger page to load.

Anyway... moving on... when we were in Hilo a few days ago, we stopped at a place called Hilo Hattie's -- it's like a really touristy place to buy Hawaiian souvenirs. Great place to find Hawaiian shirts and coconut leis and macadamia nuts. When we were in there, Rick noticed a poster for sale on one of the walls -- it was a painting of an active volcano and a woman with long hair adorned with flowers. Rick read the caption underneath the picture and asked, "who's Pete?" I looked at the picture more closely and said, "that's not PETE, it's PELE -- you know, Pele? The goddess of fire?" But of course, as often happens with things like this, the name "Pete" stuck. So on Wednesday, as we drove to Volcanoes National Park -- home to Kiluaea, the most active volcano in the world -- we wondered if Pete would be angry enough to show us some lava.

But what we didn't realize, until after we'd driven three hours from the hotel to the park (which was a pretty drive, but still a looong drive...), was that in order to actually SEE any lava, you have to drive another 20 miles down to the ocean, and then WALK three miles over fields of cooled lava (and if you've ever seen cooled lava, you know it doesn't exactly make for a level, smooth walking surface). Leave it to Pete to deny easy access to her firey light show. Needless to say, we opted out of the three mile hike. We did, however, drive the 20 miles down to the ocean, where we could see the steam rising off the water in the distance from lava spilling into the ocean. We also walked over some of the recent lava flow from the 1990's -- the road we were driving on was covered right up by the lava, and you can still see a "no parking" sign peeking out from the black rock.

So it was not Pete's will that we get an up-close-and-personal view of the red hot lava, but we still got a few decent pictures, and we definitely got some good exercise. Here's the latest batch of pictures:

The cauldera of Kiluaea...

Steam vent -- these are all over the park...

One of the craters, with spots of yellow sulfur... the whole park kinda smelled like a fireplace... I soooooo needed a shower when we got back to the hotel...

More steam vents...

Some of the cooled lava ribbons...

Lava flow from the 1990's that covered the road...

No Parking sign...

Steam coming off the ocean in the distance (I guess about three miles in the distance...)

Looking out over the lava toward a grove of palm trees...

The fury of the goddess Pete...

This was a lava tube -- lava used to flow through the rock here, and eventually it cooled and left a tunnel behind...

Back at the hotel -- one of the many waterfalls on the grounds...

The guy who lights all the tiki torches at night...

Dinner outside in the wind last night (it was very windy last night...)

View of the sunset from the restaurant on the beach...

So that's it for now... I have to go help Rick finish packing, because we need to check out of the hotel in about an hour. Our plane doesn't leave until around 11 tonight -- so in the meantime, we have to find other things to do. We're thinking of driving back to Hilo and visiting a candy factory someone told us we should see -- I've heard that they dip just about anything in chocolate. Maybe they dip chocolate in chocolate... that'd be great... I'll be sure to find out...