Volcano National Park

Luckily we actually woke up pretty early today, as it was my most important day - volcano day! Bob went up and brought down some fruit items for me, although a clutzy woman bumped into him and made him spill half of the orange juice. Ah well, it figures! I then showered while he went and ate his own breakfast upstairs in the buffet area. He found that yes, the omelet line is shorter in the "outside buffet" - but they didn't have any fruit out there at all. The cereal station is also inside only. Today there were french toast and waffles out. Bob says the french toast is a must-have :) They had white toast, wheat toast, bagels, croissants, english muffins, sticky buns. For some reason the toaster is far away from the bread. There was OJ, cranberry juice and a mystery juice (maybe papaya?). They weren't labelled. In fact lots of things weren't labelled well - there were two types of sausage, but they didn't have names to explain why they were different. In general some things were hot, some were cold.

For herbal teas they have camomile, mint and orange. There is Splenda in your room as well as other sweeteners. We had to take the coffee filter bin completely out of our coffee maker to make tea - it was pretty grimy and made the water smell like coffee! Note that from our aft cabin we had a gorgeous view as we came into dock. The starboard side is up against the docks here, the opposite of what people who think "port = docks" always means :)

There was no "time to go ashore" announcement. We only started downstairs at 8am - i.e. we weren't in the group of people massed by the door waiting to leap off immediately. I knew that pundits on the forums would imply that this would leave us waiting hours for a shuttle, but I don't like mobs :). We were pleased by no lines at all to get off the ship - just a swipe of the card and we walked down into the big empty warehouse with hula dancers. We were swiping through at 8:02, and by 8:05 we found the guy with the Thrifty sign who asked us to wait a few minutes. By 8:10 we were all on the van and on the way to the Thrifty station at the airport. It was 8:17 when we got there. There were only 3 couples (including us) and we were all Blue Chip members. Being Blue Chip means they have all your info in the system so check-through was super fast. An added bonus - because we were in the "second wave" they had run out of standard cars and offered us free upgrades to a four wheel drive jeep, a convertible or a mini-van. We took the jeep since we had plans to go galavanting! The total cost was $46.32.

I took pictures of every tiny ding on the car because we'd read horror stories about people who had gotten charged for dents they did not cause. I figured photographic evidence might be helpful :)

Unfortunately, Bob had somehow forgotten his wallet which had his license and National Park pass in it. So I drove us back to the ship. It's only 7 minutes, after all :). They check boarding card and photo ID to let you into the ship parking area for security, so for Bob they had to call to the ship to verify he was who he says he was. I then waited in the parking lot while he sprinted onto the ship, grabbed his stuff and sprinted back again. We left here about 8:42. Next we drove to the nearby Walmart because my cold was getting worse, to get me some Dayquil to survive the day, and some gatorade. We'd brought a soft sided cooler with us and stocked it with bananas and oranges as snacks for the day. Then we were off! We were at Walmart at 9:00.

OK, now for the climb up the volcano. We were going to head to the Southernmost point and then work our way backwards. The road goes up steeply! We began at 82F at ground level.

9:21 - 1k feet, 76F
9:27 - 2k feet, 72F
9:32 - 2.5k feet
9:35 - 3k feet
9:37 - 3.5k feet
9:40 - we hit Volcano National Park and drove past, heading towards the southernmost point. The "high point" on the road of 4024' it right after the sign, between mile marker 69 and 70. We head down the other side now, by 10:03 we're back down to 1000' and 76F. Note that there's no radio stations at all out here, but 3 bars on our Verizon phone. Gas is up 20 cents a gallon out in these reaches. It gets VERY windy as you get down into the coastline - they in fact have both a new, alive wind farm here and an old, sad, dead one. We hit this "wind farm graveyard" about 10:33. The road to the southernmost point in the entire US goes from good at the beginning to one road and very broken up. You have to pull aside when you pass cars to get through here. Down at the actual coast, it turns into four wheel drive only roads. Make sure you take an appropriate car if you want to go here!

It is of course cool to be here - but there isn't anything "different" about this location. And it's a haul! So if you're a person who loves hitting all the various spots in the world (like we are) it's worth the ride, but if this is your first time to the Hawaii island and you haven't seen the other spots, you might want to balance just if it's right choice for your time constraints.

So at 10:54 we left the southernmost point. We in fact were now behind a Prowler who simply was not well fitted to driving on these roads and was going about 5mph :) We easily drove on the grass and went around them. They honked at us for passing them! This was the only odd car we saw on this road - pretty much all the other cars were four wheel drive and passed each other on the grass with a wave as we meandered down the roads. We began climbing up again. The landscapes looked very much like Ireland with palm trees :)

By 11:05 the road was back to normal, by the dead wind farm. At 11:12 we reached the main road again with a sign - 40 miles to volcano, 50 miles to Kona. At 11:31 we hit the turn off to the black sand beach. It was a VERY short drive to get to the actual beach, with a little restaurant and no parking fee. I saw a red bird along the way, and a little mongoose type creature.

The black sand beach was neat, but small. There was one turtle nestled in some rocks and another one underwater who only poked his head up every once in a while. We hung out here for about a half hour before heading out again.

12:08 - leave the beach
12:19 - 2000ft
12:23 - 2500ft
12:27 - 3000ft
12:31 - 3500ft
12:36 - 4024 crest
12:37 - park entrance. They say am530 has radio messages from the park but really they just said "don't run over the nene!" :) We were guided to go CLOCKWISE around the park because all tours tend to go counter-clockwise and you want to avoid being stuck with them. We have a national park pass so were waved through for free. Everyone should definitely get a pass! They are great for seeing all sorts of beautiful areas.

We began by heading left, at 35mph. You hit Kilauea'iki Overlook pretty quickly - this is a cool "smaller crater" within the giant Kilauea Caldera. Then the next spot is the Thurston Lava Tube. Now this is a location with a dual personality. The first half is the "big tour" area. You walk down a short jungly path with birds, rich foliage. Then there's a yawning cave mouth! This is the lava tube. When the lava flowed here, the outside cooled down and got hard. The inside kept flowing. When the lava stopped flowing, the tube emptied out. There are lights down the first half, so you can see how intriguing the sides are. But it gets better.

Halfway down the tube are stairs up - and a gate that warns you that the second half of the tube is not lit. We brought flashlights!! Many people commented as we went through the gate that they wished they had brought flashlights. It was SO cool leaving the crowd behind and going down the dark half of the tube. Neat and a bit scary for me - once you got down the tube a bit, it was completely dark forward and back. There were no bats, no spiders, no insects. It was just dark ... dark and smooth. If you turned off your lights (which of course we did) it was pitch black. We finally reached a point where the roof was coming down and I didn't want to go further. Bob ventured even further ahead to see how far it went, and he didn't get to the end before he was out of sight of my light and came back to me. Very fun!

When we got back to the stair area, once again people were surprised to see us down in the "dark area" and wished they'd brought lights, and asked us what we'd seen. So lesson to the wise - bring flashlights with you! It is well worth it.

We drove forward and then turned to go down the 19 mile Chain of Craters road. This is a REALLY cool road that goes to the see, alongside many different lava flows. The hardened lava is right alongside the road, labelled with the year each flow happened. You can see how it rolled down the hillside. In one spot you can even see the "old road" that the lava took out! Finally at the very bottom are trailer homes that serve as mobile visitor stations (so they can move if the lava comes) and you can see the "lava arch" at the ocean.

At 2:13 we were ready to leave the end and drive back up again. We stopped at several spots to take pictures. Once again, the rule of thumb is to drive in as quickly as possible, so that you can stop slowly as you wish on the way out and be able to best time how much time you have left to get home before the ship sails :) We got back up to the main Crater Rim Drive and turned left at 2:42pm.

The next stop was the Halema'uma'u Overlook - this is another COOL mini-crater within the big caldera. There are volcanic fumes all over the place here! Even the crater is steaming. You walk a short 0.2 miles to a platform and look out over the crater. Then we drove along the crater rim drive further (clockwise) around to the steam vents. These are BILLOWING steam vents with volcanic gasses (VOG). One guy even walked right in the middle of them! That was a little too insane for us, but we did admire their power. We left here at 3:30pm, and swung by the visitor center for a quick stop to grab some post cards.

It was time to head out. at 3:35 we were at 3500', 3:37 was 3000'. This is a steep road! The road goes between 45mph and 55mph. by 3:51 we were at 1000'. By 4:05 we were at the Chevron by Walmart for our $3.37/gallon gas fill up. We had used just over a half talk during all of this driving. We were filled up by 4:12 and in short order got to the airport, where you could see the ship!

Now for the shuttle. There were tons of people waiting as we pulled up. There were no issues at all about "dings etc" with returning the car, i.e. they didn't try to claim we had caused any damage as others had reported. A shuttle came at 4:28 and filled up completely with 18 people waiting. Another shuttle came at 4:33 and only took 12, and more were now waiting. So another came at 4:34 which we got on, 20 people were still waiting when we left. So there are big crowds but they do cycle regularly. They were taking people for both the Pride of America and the Pride of Aloha.

They went to the Pride of America first, and everyone in the van had to produce a ship boarding pass and photo ID in order to get through the security gate. We then got off and into the line in the warehouse. We were off the van at 4:46pm. We were in line at 4:49. It was a typical airport metal detector set, the line moved quickly, and by 4:55 we were swiping our card to walk on the ship!

Photos from Volcano National Park

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