A Good Christian Raisin’ and a Eighth Grade Education
I got an email the other day pointing me to a photoblog of Cartagena, Colombia, the hometown of The Missus. Some very cool photos there, mostly of the older part of the city that is within the walls. Here are a few from our trip in 2006 also.
Here’s the Wikipedia article on Cartagena if you’re interested in more about the history.
On a side note, I’m really loving the ease of posting photos and galleries in WordPress 2.5
A couple of years ago (in our single days) we were fortunate enough to get to travel to Maui and stay with some friends. While we were there, we took a day to visit Haleakala and take a horseback riding tour of the crater. Unlike most horseback tours that I’ve been on, this one was worth every penny, even though it was twice as expensive as the others. They tell you the tour is four hours, but it’s more like 6 or 7 hours. No complaints from us though.
There is a plant called the Haleakala Silversword that is only found within the crater of the volcano. Silverswords are related to the sunflowers that all of us are familiar with, but are very unique plants. Silverswords usually grow for years, like 30/40/50 years, as a sphere that’s low to the ground. Each year, in June/July, a few Silverswords in the crater will grow a long flowery stalk, and once this occurs the plant dies. The dead plant still retains its stalk, but it’s obviously dead
Haleakala is littered with dead Silverswords, and there are lots of the live, sphere shaped plants to be seen as well. We were lucky to have an opportunity to go into the crater while the Silverswords were flowering–just seeing that in itself is pretty rare. But we were able to get a once in a lifetime photo while we were there. Here, in one frame, is an example of the Silversword in each one of its stages. This may be the only photo of a plant I think is actually very exciting.
Quick! Take the opportunity this power outage has provided you to prove to the world once and for all that you are the biggest collection of jackasses alive.
We were just watching Fox News here at work and they’re showing a busy intersection (79th and 10th I think) where the stoplights are out. People are just cruising right through at high speeds like total morons.
And what the hell is the police department doing? They showed a couple of motorcycle cops cruise through exactly like the rest of the drivers. It doesn’t take a PR genius to realize that this exact intersection is on worldwide TV and that you need to get this one taken care of–force the, ahem, “news” people to find another intersection to film idiot drivers. Then again, I guess they’d only have to go a block or so to get the exact same footage.
We went over to Oahu and stayed in Honolulu for a couple of days. When we came back we got a rental car and drove back to my friends’ house by going around West Maui. It was a one lane road for most of the trip. Unbelievable scenery. We spent more time out of the car looking at things than we did in the car.
Our strategy for the drive was to stop when we saw something cool or if we saw a “local” car pulled over somewhere. This worked out great–got to see a couple of really cool things that weren’t in any book we’d seen.
We drove counterclockwise around West Maui in order to end up at my friends’ house. For the first part of the drive we saw a couple of ecotour vans that were taking people on hikes, so we’d get out there and follow the trail. We saw some really nice waterfalls and there weren’t many people at all.
We’d later find out that West Maui isn’t nearly as traffic ridden as the road to Hana. As is true with most things, fewer people made it better.The picture to the left is probably the coolest spot we saw on the drive. There was a local car parked beside the road, so we jumped out and looked for a trail. It took a while for us to find the small little path to walk down, and we eventually had to climb down a bunch of rocks to get to the water.
To give some perspective, this photo was taken from the road. There’s a girl playing on the rocks while her dad fishes…can you see her?
The next day we took the Hana Highway, camped overnight, and drove all the way around Haleakala on the other side of Maui.
