In just 5 days on the big island of Hawaii, Jenn and I managed to find plenty of interesting things to see and do, including: night diving with huge manta rays, watching lava explode into the sea from 1/4 mile away, and watching the sun set from 14,000 feet atop Mauna Kea, the world's largest volcano! You would think that stargazing from this altitude would be incredible too, but you'd be wrong (sort of). Turns out that the air is so thin up there and oxygen so sparse that the parts of the brain responsible for interpreting visual input don't function as well as they do at lower elevations. What that means is that, although the air is crystal clear up there, we have a hard time actually seeing the stars that are right in front of your face! Cool, huh? I found myself wishing I had a supplemental oxygen kit with me, to see if breathing pure oxygen would make the stars appear brighter.
As for the night dive, I can now say that I have been head-butted, belly-bumped, and wing-slapped by HUGE manta rays (the big girls are up to 20 feet across!). The mantas feed on plankton, which are attracted to the lights that the divers carry with them....very attracted. If you place the light next to your head, the mantas might mistake it for the light and bang into your skull before realizing their error. Good fun!
Now that we're back on Maui, I have two days to prepare for Catalina island, pack all my stuff up and get it off-island, and also help Jenn as much as possible for when she leaves a few weeks after me. While I'm working at SeaCamp on Catalina, she will travel to Guatamala for a trip with a good friend of hers, then come back and go on a road trip with her mother, stopping to visit family in various states across the country. At the end of it all, we're thinking of relocating to Monterey county and seeing what kind of life we can set up there.
And so, the adventure continues...
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