One last photo of breakfast. 🙂
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Tag Archives: photos
Random phone photos
I have a few things on my phone for you. 🙂
5th Ave at night.
Our cafe Tulum, protecting us from the rain.
Cycling Tulum.
My special promotional Corona.
M’lady insisted we eat at McDonald’s one night.
Looking for gifts for our cat sitters. 😀 (these are every where)
Water spout off shore on our drive around Cozumel.
Adrian and Rooster Scooters.
We forgot to get photos of us driving, so here’s Miranda afterward. 🙂
Best place to eat. Make sure your Spanish isn’t bad. Home of the bitchy waitress who refused to slow down her speech for a couple tourists who were trying their best. But at 120 pesos for two tasty meals and 2 drinks (around $10), we’ll accept some amount of abuse.
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Dos Ojos photos!
Miranda was trying to get a photo that was split between above and below water. She got these cool photos instead, as the camera must only be able to focus in one area at once.
Trying to catch a little fish.
They have hammocks set up near the vendors. We took advantage of them.
A few photos of the Second Ojo.
A cool hole in the ceiling.
More underwater selfie!
Akumal snorkelling turtle photos!
Miranda preps to snorkel.
Turtle photos!
Snorkel selfie!
Birds on a boat.
This map is pretty important to successfully swimming at Akumal. Otherwise, you might not swim far enough and might miss “a turtle oasis”…
Diving photos
Here are some photos from diving!
Starting with my only two photos from The Pit. It’s a big hole in the ground…so cool!
This line is our direction through the caves, there are two lines running through this section and they loop around back to the beginning. I’m told that they are also used for actual cave divers to find their way back from when they go out and lay their own lines into dark caves.
I was told that this is the “Barbie line” so named because an alligator ate a tourist named Barbie. And that the alligator was still out there…Erik made a chompy hand signal when we reached this…I shook my head and you couldn’t see my “funny…” face because of the regulator. 😛
This is a picture of our air bubbles collecting in the rock crevasses. Because, of course, it has no where else to go down there!
Another scuba group. They looked cool over there.
We swam to the “bat cave”. So called because of the bats…
This is the snorkelling area. Miranda and I came back here the next day because I absolutely had to show her this!!
Me!
Some more water.
3 flights this morning, then off to the other Hawaiian winery – meaning that Miranda and I have now visited 100% of the wineries in Hawaii. Then off to the beach again!
Oh yeah and…
TURTLE!!!!!!!
I have a couple videos as well, I’ll try to post them somewhere and link back here.
Sunrise, Flying, and the Road to Hana
This was a hell of a day. We woke at 3am and left at 3:30am, arriving at Haleaekala an hour and a half later, driving up a winding mountain road in the dark. We were rewarded with a great looking sunrise.
After the sunrise, we drove down the hill and then back up a different section of hill and had a great flight from Ferns launch.
After our flight we drove around the road to Hana. We stopped at a lava tube just outside of Hana.
We were out for 14 hours, driving for a good chunk of it. When we got home, the sun went down shortly after and Miranda and I ran out to watch it head out.
Some more Hawaii
It’s been a day of a single flight (clouds came in quickly), some swimming (still no bloody turtles!!).
Hawaii – Take 2
I’m not going to blog every day this time. I’m pretty blogged out after writing about all of Adepticon. 😛 But here’s some photos and some mini-stories to go with them. 🙂
The flight area in Maui is pretty nice. Big open green fields. Only a few things you have to worry about – some cattle, a spot for RC planes, cowpies and one fence. The LZ comes into a bowl, which is worrisome to land on since the ground continues sloping away as you’re trying to land, but it slopes up again shortly after and there’s lots of space.
We only got one flight in on the first day. The flying window is from 7am-ish until 11am-ish, if you’re lucky. The winds get to strong and/or to turbulent after that. The Echoes launch is a very easy launch – I called it Diefenbaker++, as you could really just kite all the way down the hill if you so choose.
Drove around, went to Lahaina and wandered around.
Up again early this morning and out to Echoes launch again. I had 2 easy flights and landings from there, Russ had 3 and Melissa had 2. The launch and landing are so close together that it’s easy to get many flights, even if they are max 6 minutes long.
After a flight each from Echoes (at 3000ft above sea level), we drove up another 15 minutes to Ferns launch, which is 6000ft above sea level. When we got up there, Dexter gave us a mini-orientation and then quickly had to go off to do a tandem before the clouds closed it off. He said that as long as you can see the valley, it was ok to launch. Apparently some pilots fly by instrument from here, since the clouds come in pretty quickly. One pilot we were talking to said that one time he was 4000 above the LZ and couldn’t see it, so he just kept flying out. You land in a cow field eventually, and when he drove back up to the LZ it was completely socked in.
We didn’t end up flying from here – the clouds came in and closed off the land and we decided to go down to the Echoes launch again. We’ll try Ferns tomorrow morning instead!
We went to a goat farm after that and checked out the goats and bought goat truffles. We’ll eat those later. 🙂
I think we barely avoided coming home with a new goat – they were on sale for $200-$240, which I think is fairly reasonable.
Sitting around the house now, having a mango and rum blended drink and doing computery things. Heading out to the beach shortly!
Mauna Kea
After the snorkel cruise, we came back, showered and got our stuff together for freezing temperatures.
First we went downtown for sushi, which was closed. It was 3pm and we were trying to get some food in us before we started the long drive to the mountain. Ended up eating at Thai Rin instead, which was good food but less than stellar service.
Drove along highway 190, also called the Hawaii Belt Road. This was a long and straight road, and well maintained. 5
2kms (Siri tells me) later, we turned right onto Saddle Road. This road has a lot of bad press. Apparently it was originally built by the military, and so was very poorly maintained for many years. As well, it rises 6,500kms in total and drives between both Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. Coming from Kona, the first bit of it was a little dodgy. As Miranda commented “we only have the budget to re-pave half the road, so we’ll do the middle”. About 20 minutes later though, it turns into a lovely well maintained highway. That happens to go up and down like a rollercoaster. Put your hands up, it’s more fun! (At one point on our way back we both had a moment – “why is the road on our left…” *panic* no, it’s ok, it just swerves sharply left…)
40kms later, we turned left onto Mauna Kea Access Rd. 6 miles later…we’re at the Visitor Information Center at 9,000 feet elevation. Despite the weather forecast, there are clouds. We get directed to a small trail that leads to a decent sunset location and start the hike up.
This was the most brutal hike I’ve ever been on. Not because it was steep or rocky, but because of the altitude. It was somewhat steep, and a little rocky, but we had to stop every 20 feet and let my poor heart and lungs catch up. Very strange feeling. We made it to the top and it was completely socked in. That’s 0 for 2, Hawaiian mountains…
Hung out for a bit hoping, but eventually walked back down to the VIS. Sat in the car and played Carcassonne for a bit while true dark set in and we tried to get some good star photos. The best spot, however, was partially being faced by the parking lot so we kept getting car headlights and people and it wasn’t great.
We drove back down the mountain, saying that we’d stop and find a place to take some more. We found a decent spot, turned off the highway, got out of the car and started setting up when we heard a cough near us, in the pitch black. Miranda says “Hello?”. We decided later that it was probably just a goat. But at the time we both opened the nearest car door, got in, locked it and drove away as quickly as we could!
We stopped for some munchies in Waikoloa but otherwise, drove straight back to Kailua-Kona.
Today is our last stay at the luxurious Dolphin View. We somehow have to clean up our mess and take off for the Sheraton down the road – Miranda wanted to stay somewhere nice for our last night, so there we are. 🙂 Nothing much planned for the next day and a bit, some water, some shopping, we’ll see what we get up to.