Ryan's Journal

"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?" — David Mitchell

Henges and Baths

Posted from London, England at 12:23 am, August 16th, 2023

Yesterday’s adventure was a day trip out of London to visit Stonehenge, Bath and “a secret place”. I’m not normally a fan of group trips, but there are limited options if you want to see Stonehenge, so I picked a 15 person bus that was ranked well on Tripadvisor and hoped for the best. The guide was actually great, she left us alone to roam at the destinations, and having a small bus meant we could take backroads instead of the highway, which was amazingly scenic.

I’d visited Stonehenge in 1997 when it was a pull-off next to the highway and you simply got off of the motorway, parked in a dirt parking lot, walked a bit, and then admired the stones from a few feet away, kept back by a small rope barrier. Things have changed dramatically since then, with the highway relocated, the paths around the stones much farther back, and 1000x the number of people. It was still a really neat place to go; it combines history and engineering, two of my favorite topics, while also giving a druid vibe that I fully support.

Following the visit with the stones we were off to Bath, a city that still feels very much like it must have in the 1600s. I didn’t actually visit the “bath” that gives the town its name – I saw it in 1997, and rather than being a Roman bath it’s actually a Victorian estimation of what a Roman bath might look like – but did roam all over, admiring some truly impressive stone buildings. Our guide did a short walking tour where she shared how the waters from the hot spring were renowned for having “magical” healing properties and how Queen Anne swore that after drinking the water she felt revitalized, but today scientists believe that long ago many people suffered from anemia, so a shot of mineral-rich hot spring water would have simply given them the iron they were lacking and thus a massive energy boost.

For our last stop we were sworn to secrecy on its location, but it was one of England’s best preserved old villages, with rules in place to prevent any alteration of buildings. Doors and ceilings were low, there wasn’t a single beam or roof that wasn’t warped or sagging, the church was ancient, and one of the pubs dated back to the 1300s. I had a pint at a pub that was “only” a few hundred years old before we returned to the bus for our trip home. All in all, spending the day seeing ancient wonders and historical villages made for one of the better Tuesdays a person could have.

Stonehenge
The world’s most famous henge.
Pulteney Bridge in Bath
Pulteney Bridge in Bath.

Undergrounds and Overgrounds

Posted from London, England at 12:03 am, August 15th, 2023

The days have been very full so far on this trip, which hasn’t left much time to process photos, but hopefully a few will be ready for upcoming entries. Sadly, on a day that saw visits to Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London, the photos are still on my camera and I’ve not had a chance to look at them yet.

Audrey left for Canterbury yesterday, and after seeing her off to the train station I made my way to Westminster Abbey, only to see a sign at the end of a long queue stating that tickets for the day were sold out. Never one to miss a Gothic Cathedral, I discovered that purchasing a single day London Pass got me in without a ticket, and thanks to the miracle that is the internet I was in the door a short time later. The grand cathedrals always put me in awe, obviously from their historical and cultural significance, but mostly from their engineering; these things were built hundreds of years before Columbus sailed in a time where they didn’t have steam engines, much less electricity or other modern machinery. The stone was carved by hand, it was lifted hundreds of feet in the air by hand, and the craftsmanship was so good that 800 years later it’s still standing solid, all from a time when people were being burned alive for witchcraft and books had to be copied by hand.

From Westminster I made a visit to the Tower of London. I was in England once before in 1997, and we visited the Tower, but it was an incredibly short visit, and I honestly don’t remember much aside from the fact that we skipped the Crown Jewels due to the line. This time I had several hours and made sure to see the Crown Jewels, but maybe because I’m an American I came away thinking that it was all a bit silly; it’s hard enough to take politicians seriously these days, so trying to imagine Kevin McCarthy or Joe Biden with a scepter in his hand or a fuzzy crown on his head? It’s obviously neat to see the world’s largest diamond and so many other precious objects, but I couldn’t help thinking how odd it is in today’s world to still have so much wealth tied up in jewelry, golden serving plates, and other showpieces. What I did love about the Tower was the history, and (again) the engineering. They built a massive stone fortress a thousand years ago with fifteen foot thick walls, rising 100 feet into the air, and did it all using just brute strength and ingenuity, and I spent a lot of time roaming around looking at walls, doors, beams, and everything else that has stood on this site since it was built in the 1080s.

The day ended with an adventure on the subway, otherwise known as the Tube, otherwise known as the Underground, where I ironically had to take a line named “Overground”, I assume because it was mostly above-ground. After (mostly) successfully navigating two subway transfers and a bus trip I met a friend for drinks and Indian food, as well as much laughter, before again (mostly) successfully navigating the public transit system back to Victoria station and the hotel.

Mausoleums and Beatles

Posted from London, England at 1:55 pm, August 13th, 2023

After avoiding saturated fat for months I expected that I would need to relax my diet during this trip, but I was not prepared for the “English Breakfast Bap”, which is apparently a fried egg, two massive sausages, and three strips of bacon on a Brioche bun. It was tasty, and so far I haven’t had a heart attack, but we’ll see how tomorrow goes.

Following the cholesterol-with-a-side-of-grease for breakfast I walked the two miles to the British Museum, a place with so many impressive artifacts that it could easily be split into a dozen separate museums. Luckily I had read a suggestion to book an off-hours tour, so I entered with a group of about twelve other people an hour before opening and we had the Egyptian galleries to ourselves before the mobs descended. From there much time was spent battling through tour groups in the midst of archaeological treasures, but entering a room to discover the impressive statues that once adorned the Parthenon, or seeing the remnants of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, made it much easier to ignore the hordes shoving their way past.

After five hours at the museum fatigue was setting in, so I rambled home through St. James’s Park (no pigeon friends this time), past the guards in the fuzzy hats at Buckingham Palace, then rested for a bit before taking off for our next adventure. Audrey’s friend Brian Kehew is apparently in London at the same time as us, and while Abbey Road studios isn’t open for tours, they do open for lectures two weekends every year and have called in Brian and his friend Kevin to give those lectures since they wrote the definitive book on the Beatles’ time at Abbey Road. So yet again following our “never say no when Brian calls, because it will be awesome” rule, we met at Abbey Road at 5pm and were ushered through the locked gates with about 100 other Beatles fans to hear Brian and Kevin give a 90 minute lecture on the history of the studios from Studio 2, which is the studio in which the Beatles recorded almost all of their music. I hadn’t planned on visiting Abbey Road, but sitting in the room where so many great songs were born, and hearing the inside scoop on how it happened from a friend of ours, will be a very cool memory.

Jolly Olde Adventures

Posted from London, England at 11:50 am, August 12th, 2023

2023’s big adventure is underway. We left Los Angeles at 5pm yesterday, slept for somewhere between 3 and 7 minutes during the 10.5 hour flight, and arrived in England where we proceeded to roam all over Central London. In a city known for its history, culture, architectural & religious monuments, and impressive museums, the day’s highlights were a flock of overly-enthusiastic pigeons in St. James’s Park. In my defense I’m hitting the British Museum first thing tomorrow morning, and we arrived at Westminster Abbey too late to go inside, but that being said, the birds were a lot of fun today.

Many more adventures should follow over the coming three weeks.

Pigeon friends in St. James's Park
A creature of questionable intelligence, with a fearless bird friend on his shoulder.

Goodbye 2013

Posted from Culver City, California at 4:38 pm, February 20th, 2023

The server that used to run mountaininterval.org, as well as a few other sites, was coming up on its tenth birthday, so it seemed like a good time to move on from 2013 and upgrade to a new machine. I think I migrated everything over successfully, but if anyone has issues logging in, leaving comments, or anything else please let me know.

15 Years of Bad Predictions

Posted from Culver City, California at 11:12 pm, January 23rd, 2023

For reasons that are now lost to history, back in 2009 I thought it might be fun to make some predictions about the coming year. That initial post started a string of fifteen straight years of making ill-informed and usually incorrect guesses about what was to transpire over the upcoming twelve months. While the journal hasn’t seen a ton of posts over the past few years, the tradition of bad predictions has lived on, so without further ado, here’s a list of 15 things that probably won’t happen in 2023.

  1. SpaceX is going to have several spectacular failed launch attempts of its new Starship rocket, but will get the vehicle to orbit.

    With the caveat that in a few years they will almost certainly be launching and landing the world’s largest and most powerful rocket regularly, Starship is a brand new vehicle using a lot of unproven technologies, and Elon Musk is known to push the boundaries, so I think this year they will have a few spectacular failures. If it has a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly anywhere near the launchpad they will need to spend months rebuilding the launch infrastructure, so a single failure could result in six months of delays before they can try again.
  2. Apple is going to launch a new VR headset, but despite a ton of initial press it won’t catch on with consumers.

    VR headsets seem (to me) like a cool idea that I would never want to actually own, but I’m also getting to the “you kids stay off of my lawn” stage of life, so maybe I’m missing something. I think augmented reality glasses will be a thing soon – imagine driving and having directions appear on your glasses, or going to a party and not having to worry about forgetting everyone’s name – but a clunky VR box to wear around so that you can experience a TRON-like view of the Grand Canyon from your living room? It seems fun once, but not something people will want to spend $1500 on.
  3. The Ukraine war will end by summer, with Russia ceding all claims to Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, in exchange for some sort of face-saving gesture like a promise that Ukraine won’t join NATO.

    Everyone has been inspired by Ukraine’s defense against a much larger foe, but Russia continues to do incredible damage to Ukraine despite slowly losing this war. Putin needs a way to save face, and Ukraine needs Russia to stop raining destruction down upon them, so once Ukraine has retaken its territory I think that both sides will be highly motivated to negotiate an end to hostilities.
  4. Ford will be responsible for 30% of all US EV sales by the end of the year.

    As of Q3, Ford had 7.2% of EV sales, but they are massively ramping up production of the F-150, Mach-E, and Ford Transit van, all of which have enormous demand. Ford is going to be able to sell as many EVs as they can build, and all indications are that they will be able to build a lot.
  5. The US will default on its debt for the first time in history.

    This is a prediction that I hope doesn’t come true, but in its early days the current Republican House majority has let its far right members drive the agenda, with the supposed moderates doing nothing to stop them. As a result, I think Democrats will refuse to make concessions for agreeing to pay the country’s bills, Republicans will be unwilling to back down, and markets will panic as the US finds itself facing default. My 401k is not excited about this prospect, so again, I hope this prediction is very, very wrong.
  6. Tesla will begin deliveries of its new Cybertruck by June 2023, but they won’t offer the truck for the $39,900 that was initially announced, and won’t sell a model that costs less than $50,000 in 2023.

    Tesla has a history of announcing prices for vehicles that don’t materialize; for example the Model 3 was supposed to cost $35,000 when it was announced, but the cheapest version of the vehicle today is $43,990, and that’s after a recent $3,000 price drop. While they will claim that a $39,900 Cybertruck is coming some day, I’m betting we definitely won’t see that price in 2023, and probably won’t see it in the future.
  7. Donald Trump will drop out of the 2024 Presidential Race before the end of the year.

    Republican politicians have blamed Trump for losses in the past three elections, and polls seem to indicate that Republican voters want someone new. Meanwhile, there is an argument to be made that Trump is primarily running to fund his legal troubles or to benefit his own businesses, and with money not flowing as fast these days he may seek out other options for addressing his financial difficulties. With the current Justice Department understandably reticent to set a precedent by prosecuting a former President, it seems possible that a deal may be offered to end some of the legal cases against him in exchange for him getting out of the political spotlight, and with pressure coming from the Right as well it could lead to an early exit from the Presidential race.
  8. Layoffs will continue in the technology sector in 2023, but there won’t be a broad recession.

    Statistics indicate that about 200,000 jobs have been cut in the technology sector during the most recent round of retrenchment, but as a tech worker I actually think that this was overdue. COVID made remote work the norm, allowing a massive number of people to change jobs, and for the technology sector in particular this led to gigantic salary increases as companies struggled to keep existing employees and replace lost employees. Today a lot of tech companies have people on the payroll at huge cost, and as a result it seems likely there will be significant cost-cutting going on in tech, while other industries will be able to continue as normal.
  9. At least two of the following three things will happen in the NFL: Tom Brady will retire (for real this time), Aaron Rodgers will retire, and Jimmy Garoppolo will join the New York Jets.

    While I’m usually bad at predictions, I’m particularly bad at predicting the NFL, but the only reason Rodgers and Brady have to continue playing is that they want to win Super Bowls, and neither Tampa Bay nor Green Bay are favorites to win the Super Bowl next year. Meanwhile, San Francisco can’t afford to keep Jimmy Garoppolo, and the Jets think they are a quarterback away from going to the Super Bowl.
  10. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will be a flop, earning less than the $317 million that the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made.

    Everyone wants to see another good Indiana Jones movie, but the last one featured a terrible plot and CGI monkeys, and there doesn’t seem to be any good reason why they’re making another movie. Let’s hope they go out with a bang, but it’s been 42 years since Raiders of the Lost Ark came out; if you want a franchise to last that long, follow the lead of James Bond and get a fresh cast and creative crew.
  11. Joe Biden will announce that he is running for a second term, and no major Democrat aside from (maybe) Bernie Sanders will announce that they are running against him.

    Biden quietly accomplished a ton during his first two years, and while there are serious concerns about his age, I’m not sure if the Democrats have an obviously better option to put on the ballot for 2024.
  12. Kathleen Kennedy will be removed as the head of Lucasfilm.

    As an unabashed Star Wars fan I’m impressed by the new Mandalorian and Andor Star Wars shows, but have been massively disappointed by most of the new films and most of their other shows. Kennedy doesn’t seem to be a fan of Star Wars, and the franchise is too valuable to Disney to not have someone better at the helm. Were I betting man, Dave Filoni or Jon Favreau would be my picks to steer the ship moving forward.
  13. Twitter will see declining revenue and user engagement under Elon Musk, but no viable competitor will emerge by the end of the year.

    Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has seemed to me to be a clinic in how not to run a business. He has alienated advertisers, fired employees without understanding their role, and fundamentally misunderstood that Twitter isn’t a technology company as much as it is a moderated community of users. That being said, there isn’t yet a viable competitor, and none seems to be on the horizon, so he’ll have a while yet to figure things out.
  14. Athing Mu of the USA will break the 40 year old world record in the women’s 800m.

    Athing Mu has been unbeatable since she was a high schooler in New Jersey. Last year she caught COVID and it affected her season, but this year I think she’ll come back with a vengeance and is capable of breaking one of track and field’s oldest world records.
  15. 2023 will see two “quiet” supersonic planes successfully flying over our heads.

    NASA is planning to fly their X-59 plane in 2023, and expects the plane to have a sonic “thump” that is only 1/1000th as loud as the sonic boom of existing supersonic planes. Meanwhile Boom Aerospace should be flying their XB-1 plane by mid-year. As Boeing’s long-delayed 777-X proves, there are no guarantees with test aircraft, but just as SpaceX revolutionized access to space over the past decade, I think we’re on the verge of seeing supersonic passenger travel return to the skies.

And there they are. Fifteen predictions for the fifteenth year of making predictions, and based on history most of these will be laughably incorrect twelve months from now. Still, it’s a fun little exercise, and I’ll see everyone at the start of 2024 to recount how awful this year’s prognostications actually were.

2022 Predictions Recap

Posted from Culver City, California at 9:58 am, January 8th, 2023

Here’s the recap of my annual exercise in public embarrassment, otherwise known as the predictions about the coming year. The original 2022 predictions were written twelve months ago in January, during the halcyon days in which Tom Brady was still retired and Elon Musk hadn’t yet decided to purchase Twitter and burn it to the ground lead the company to newfound glory.

  1. Democrats will keep the Senate, gaining between 1-3 seats.

    CORRECT. I’m off to an unexpectedly strong start. Democrats picked up Pennsylvania and held on in Georgia (decisively winning the “vampire vs werewolf” demographic), thus increasing their majority by one seat from 50 to 51.

  2. Republicans will regain the House, gaining 20-30 seats.

    WRONG. Republicans did win the House, but to everyone’s surprise they netted only nine additional seats. Since it took fifteen votes for the normally-routine task of electing a Speaker, I’m debating converting my 401k to canned goods before the markets have to face the fallout from likely government shutdowns and debt ceiling defaults over the next two years.

  3. SpaceX will have a successful orbital test of their new Starship vehicle, but won’t successfully land the vehicle by the end of the year.

    WRONG. SpaceX was blasting its new rocket into the sky seemingly every week back in 2021, but despite getting clearance from the FAA for an orbital test, they didn’t attempt a single launch in 2022. Hopefully 2023 will be the year that sees this game-changing rocket usher us into the Star Trek future we’ve been waiting for since the Apollo program ended.

  4. A viable Facebook competitor is finally going to emerge.

    WRONG. I feel like I’ve been predicting this one for years, and for years it hasn’t happened. There are some obvious challenges – any new social network is pointless unless it has a lot of users, so barrier to entry is massive – but Facebook is distracted with selling virtual real estate to cartoon characters when the world really just needs a social network that can effectively help people find dates, jobs, and plumbers.

  5. Median home prices will decline 5-10 percent by the end of the year.

    WRONG. Median home prices ended 2021 at $423,600, and despite the mortgage rates climbing from 3% to 7% in 2022, average home prices still increased to $454,900 as of Q3. With only one out of five correct, the 2022 predictions are obviously not going well thus far.

  6. President Biden’s Build Back Better bill will pass in some form this year.

    NAILED IT. Joe Manchin made things dicey for a while, but once they tricked him by changing the name to the Inflation Reduction Act, the House & Senate couldn’t move fast enough to pass this thing before the election. The engineer in me is excited to see legislation that speeds up the transition to batteries, wind and solar, while the environmentalist in me is looking forward to seeing a future that hopefully has a few unmelted glaciers in it.

  7. Tesla will face lawsuits or otherwise be forced to issue refunds for its delays in delivering on its “full self driving” package.

    CORRECT. A class action lawsuit was filed in September. Elon Musk has been making yearly promises that full self driving is “only a year away” every year since 2014, so as much as I admire Tesla’s engineering, it seems only fair to start sending out refunds to people who didn’t realize that when Elon said “one year away” he was using Jupiter years and not Earth years.

  8. COVID will fade into the background and life will return to normal once the Omicron wave subsides.

    CORRECT. In retrospect this prediction seems relatively obvious, but after nearly three years of masks and lockdowns it has been a nice return to normalcy to be able to visit friends or travel on an airplane without feeling like a character in a post-apocalypic disaster movie.

  9. Amazon is going to announce a shipping service to compete with UPS and Fedex.

    WRONG. This seems like it could be an easy profit center for Amazon, but I’m a programmer, not a businessman, so I’ll defer to the people that actually know what they’re doing to explain why a company that is already delivering to the same places as UPS each day couldn’t also make money shipping private parcels.

  10. There will be monster trades for at least two of these three: Aaron Rodgers, Russell Wilson and Derek Carr. I’ll also predict that Deshaun Watson is going to stay unemployed and that the Browns are sticking with Baker.

    WRONG. At least I got Russell Wilson correct? When I wrote these predictions last year, Tom Brady was still retired, and I had no idea that the Browns wanted to make a younger version of Bill Cosby the face of their franchise. As someone recently wrote in the Washington Post, I’m not going to stop watching football, but I probably should.

  11. The Ford F-150 Lightning will run away with Motortrend’s 2022 Truck of the Year award.

    CORRECT. Not only did it win, but it won unanimously. I’m really impressed with Ford’s electrification efforts so far, and the current F-150 was built on a platform that is still optimized for gas powered vehicles. When they eventually switch their manufacturing to a new platform that is optimized for electric Ford is going to give Tesla a run for their money.

  12. This year will finally see major progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

    WRONG. Not only didn’t this happen, but Benjamin Netanyahu was re-elected for a sixth term, so the prospects of a peaceful resolution anytime soon appear grim. Sometimes I don’t understand the humans.

  13. At least three more major newspapers will follow the Chicago Sun Times and become non-profits.

    WRONG. As far as I can tell not even a single newspaper took the non-profit route this year. Does anyone reading this journal have a spare hundred million to throw at the LA Times or other newspapers? The death of local news is going to be something that historians are writing about fifty years from now.

  14. Video game streaming will become a major selling point of streaming services like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Apple TV.

    WRONG. The fact that this prediction didn’t come true surprises me greatly. There are rumors that Amazon is spending a billion dollars on the Lord of the Rings series, surely they could get a better return on investment by putting Wii Golf and Doom on Fire TV sticks?

  15. The Browns will win the AFC North and will win at least 11 regular season games.

    WRONG. I am never making another prediction about the Browns again.

Final score: 5/15, which surprisingly is an above-average result. 2023 will mark the fifteenth year of making incorrect guesses about the future; those predictions should be online in the next couple of weeks.

Exciting times

Posted from Culver City, California at 8:32 pm, October 22nd, 2022

I’ve mostly been using the journal for travel logs over the past couple of years, but the other day I was thinking about all of the news that I’ve gotten excited about this year, and realized how much cool stuff has occurred. Since it’s easy to focus on everything wrong in the world, here’s my list of a few things that have gone very right lately.

  • The Infrastructure Act. Signed into law in November 2021, this law adds $550 billion in new spending for transportation infrastructure, energy infrastructure, water infrastructure, and broadband infrastructure. I’m an engineer by training, so any time I see infrastructure projects I get excited, but this bill in particular excites me since the US has been under-investing in infrastructure for decades, and infrastructure is an investment that tends to pay for itself many times over in the long run. And for those with concerns about the cost, I think there’s a strong argument to be made that if we’re OK with spending $740 billon for just one year on the military, a once-in-a-generation investment of $550 billion for infrastructure isn’t too extreme.
  • The Inflation Reduction Act. In non-political speak, this bill is The One About Climate Change and Health Care. With a surprise change of heart from Joe Manchin after they renamed “Build Back Better” to “Inflation Reduction”, the biggest investment in clean energy in US history became law in August 2022, putting $391 billion towards electric vehicles, wind, solar, batteries, grid modernization, and other climate change mitigation, while also updating Obamacare to extend subsidies, fix some warts, and allow price negotiation with drug companies. Carl Sagan testified before Congress in 1985 about the dangers posed by climate change; four decades later the country is slowly beginning to do some of the things that he recommended when I was an elementary school student. That depressing fact aside, in the words of a former vice president, the IRA is a big <bleeping> deal. Much like how the American Recovery Act of 2009 resulted in solar and wind becoming the predominant forms of new energy generation in the country, the IRA is going to vastly speed up the transition of the transportation sector to electric, moving much of the supply chain and manufacturing for that transition to the United States in the process. There have already been announcements of about $40 billion for fifteen battery manufacturing facilities in the US since the start of the year, and more is almost certainly coming. Were I a betting man, I would wager heavily that in ten years we’ll look with disgust at cars that belch smoke, and that batteries and cheap solar will have completely altered the electric grid; this act is definitely a BFD, and I couldn’t be more excited to see its effects over the coming years.
  • The CHIPS Act. The CHIPS Act was overshadowed by the Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, but this bill is another one to be really excited about. In the 1990s the US made about 37% of the world’s semiconductors; today that number is about 12%, with the majority of the world’s production now occurring in Asia. This $280 billion law includes $52 billion for adding chip manufacturing capacity in the United States, with most of the remaining money to be used for R&D and science programs. Again, as an engineer this type of investment seems like a smart way to spend tax dollars, and companies like Intel and Micron have already announced billions of dollars in US chip fabrication plants. Technology is the future (barring a Terminator-style robot apocalypse), so it’s good to know the jobs and facilities to build that future will be in my home country.
  • Space! After massive and frustrating delays and cost overruns, the James Webb space telescope launched on Christmas day 2021, and started beaming back amazing images six months later in July 2022. As an engineering feat this telescope is absolutely mind-blowing, and much like Hubble, it will change our understanding of the universe during its operational lifetime. Meanwhile, SpaceX just launched its 48th flight this year, has put over 3500 Starlink satellites in orbit, has made re-using rockets seem routine, and their flights sending astronauts to the space station aren’t even newsworthy anymore, despite the fact that no other company, and only a handful of nations, can put humans into orbit. Not to mention their soon-to-launch Starship rocket, which will be making trips to Mars before the end of the decade. Aside from the 1960s, there has been no more exciting time in human history to be a space nerd than right now.

There’s obviously more to cheer – floating wind turbines are finally becoming a thing and will be deployed off the California coast, marine reserves in the Pacific are helping fish stocks recover, beavers are being used to fight drought and wildfires, etc, etc. There is plenty of gloom and doom out there, but the past year has left me excited about the future.

Until We Meet Again

Posted from Culver City, California at 11:53 am, September 11th, 2022

Our trip has sadly come to an end; after driving through Hilo and across the Saddle Road, we flew out of Kona and arrived at LAX at 11pm last night. It was an amazingly fun two weeks of manta rays, sea turtles, rainforests, and volcanoes.

Two days ago we made a visit to the impressive Punalu’u Black Sand Beach, luckily arriving early in the day before we had to heed any warnings about the sand notoriously being so hot that it causes first-degree burns. From there we headed to the southernmost part of the island, which is also the southernmost point in the United States, and home to strikingly pretty coastline, a huge number of horses and cows, and one particularly ornery donkey.

Our final event of the day was a late-night return trip to the Kilauea crater. We were initially turned away before the trailhead by a ranger due to crowds, but that detour turned into an opportunity to visit the Volcano House for a cocktail and viewing of the volcano from a different vantage. We returned to the trailhead about two hours later at around 9pm to hike out to the lava lake overlook, and took a few million photos of erupting lava under the full moon.

Kilauea crater at night
Kilauea crater lava lake. My 400mm lens was again popular with everyone at the overlook who wanted to see lava close-up.
Kilauea crater at night
Kilauea crater nighttime landscape. I wish we could say we were smart enough to have planned to be there while the full moon was illuminating the landscape, but apparently we were just very lucky on this trip.

Kilauea

Posted from Volcano, Big Island, Hawaii at 9:12 pm, September 8th, 2022

Last night after exploring our new rainforest retreat home we headed into Volcanoes National Park after dark to see if we could do some photography of Kilauea’s latest eruption. After a mile long hike under a nearly-full moon a portion of the horizon started glowing red, and then we emerged onto the park’s lone lookout that provides a view of the erupting vents. A surprising number of other people also made the hike at night, and my 400mm lens proved to be a popular way for the folks there to look into the crater, nearly two miles away. Spending an evening photographing an erupting volcano is a far more interesting way to pass time than my normal Wednesday night regimen.

After arriving home late last night (11pm) we slept in (6:30am), lounged around the cottage, then went back to the park to explore a few more overlooks, the Thurston Lava Tube, and the 20 mile Chain of Craters drive that travels through craters, lava fields, rain forest, and eventually emerges at the sea where the 35 year long eruption of Puʻuʻōʻō (1983-2018) covered more than 45 square miles and added 203 acres of land to Hawaii’s coast.

Kilauea crater at night
Kilauea crater at night (five second exposure).
Kilauea crater at night
Kilauea crater at night (ten second exposure). The red flares far from the main vent are cracks in the solidified surface of the 1000 foot deep lava lake.

Living on the Edge

Posted from Volcano, Big Island, Hawaii at 7:28 pm, September 7th, 2022

This post is being written from a location in a rainforest a few miles east of the 1000 foot deep Kilauea crater lava lake. Coqui frogs are chirping (loudly) outside in the fern-covered trees, and we’re hanging out under soft lights in a wooden cottage with a wraparound deck. I did something right in a past life.

When the journal last left off we had returned from our second manta ray dive. The adventures since then couldn’t compare, but it has nevertheless been fun. We took a lounge day to rest up, during which I snorkeled with sea turtles a few times in water with limited visibility, so while they were the most chill turtles I’ve ever been around (one kept moving closer to me as he grazed on algae, until I finally had to get out of his way), the videos don’t do the experience justice. While celebrating with drinks and snacks at sunset we looked out in the water and saw two small (six foot) mantas cruising the shallows, apparently drawn in by plankton that were attracted to the hotel’s lights. Their wingtips kept popping out of the water as they looped around in water that didn’t look deep enough to support such a large fish, obviously enjoying their dinner.

Today we left the Kona area and headed south around the island towards Volcano Village. We were tipped off to an epic snorkel location, so after a visit to the Heavenly Hawaiian coffee plantation we drove down to the coast and jumped in the water, and were almost immediately greeted by a four foot moray who surprisingly swam around, fully visible, for several minutes; they are almost always tucked into crevices with only their heads sticking out, so seeing one out in the water for such a long time was special. The rest of the snorkel was great, too, with lava and coral combining to create an underwater metropolis of fish.

We made a very brief stop at Kilauea on the way here, but had to rush in order to checkin, so we’re returning to hopefully take some nighttime photos of the current eruption, provided there aren’t too many people with the same plan already there.

Manta-festing

Posted from Kona, Big Island, Hawaii at 5:29 pm, September 6th, 2022

Our second day-of-much-scuba took place yesterday, and it started in spectacular fashion with a tiger shark cruising the harbor. The divemasters immediately announced that we’d be diving with the shark (“don’t worry, they never attack divers, just don’t stay on the surface or splash around or break eye contact if she’s swimming towards you.”). Upon descending the shark was nowhere to be found (not at all unnerving to know that you’re sharing the water with a twelve foot tiger shark), but it was still a really good dive, with eels and octopus aplenty. The second dive of the morning was also shark free, and we surfaced to a boat that wouldn’t start, so we ended up getting towed back to the harbor by the same Navy SEAL boat that we snorkeled from yesterday.

The evening dive was a return to manta ray paradise, and we went in with low expectations after Friday’s extravaganza. Our fears of a less spectacular evening diminished immediately after jumping in the water when we saw a manta slowly gliding through the water below us. Upon arriving at the “campfire” a half dozen mantas were already circling, and if it’s possible I think this dive exceeded our experience on Friday. “Lisa” kept buzzing us an inch overhead, and several other mantas whose names I lost track of circled, did 360 degree loops, and otherwise kept us enthralled for the full forty-five minutes that we were allowed to stay underwater. This was definitely one of my favorite dives of all time, and both Audrey and I would do it again in a heartbeat if we ever return to this island.

Manta rays during a Kona night dive
Screen capture from one of the best days ever.

The Night of Many Mantas

Posted from Kailua-Kona, Hawaii at 10:38 pm, September 4th, 2022

I’m doing a poor job of writing daily entries, so here’s another catch-up of our time on the Big Island thus far.

We arrived on Thursday, and booked a full day of scuba diving for Friday. The two morning dives were fun but mostly uneventful – a few sea turtles, a bunch of morays, tons of reef fish. The evening dive, however, was the one we’d been looking forward to. At sunset we were moored near the airport, and the divemasters gave us instructions before we descended forty feet into darkness. Immediately two huge rays were gliding over us, and as we settled into our place around the underwater “campfire” of dive lights, more and more giant manta rays began appearing. For the next forty-five minutes we were treated to a show with a cast of over twenty different mantas, some of which were nearly sixteen feet across. Having giant rays glide by close enough to touch (which we didn’t of course, although the rays bumped into people on multiple occasions) was a magical way to spend an hour. After getting out of the water we were told that the average night sees 2-3 mantas present, so we got an amazing show.

Our next day we had scheduled a pelagic snorkel, where we headed out to deep water looking for sharks, whales, or whatever might be around. The company we booked through initially had boat issues, so they re-booked us with Wild Hawaii Ocean Adventures, and we somehow found ourselves heading out to sea at 9am aboard an 11m long Navy SEAL assault vessel, cruising in mile deep water looking for sharks to swim with. Sadly it seems we had used up our good karma with the mantas, so our four hour adventure did not include any big animals, but we did get to do some short snorkels in both shallow and deep water, and cruising around at 35 mph in a fast attack boat is not the worst way to spend a morning. Finishing up our 48 hours of activities, we closed out the night with a luau at the resort, where I ate and drank enough to last for several meals.

Today was a rest day, and after a late (6:30am) wakeup we lounged before doing a loop up to Hawi and Waimea, where we had a great view of the summit of 13,796 foot Mauna Kea volcano, as well as some amazing coastline views.

Audrey’s manta ray video.

Island Hopping

Posted from Kailua-Kona, Hawaii at 8:40 am, September 1st, 2022

Yesterday, after waking up and feeding the koi with Audrey, I picked up Aaron and we snorkeled with the world’s friendliest butterflyfish and a tiny eel for just over an hour before heading back to the hotel for a trip down the lazy river, ten rides of the waterslide (the kids were mostly not upset to have to share with grownups), and a loop around the saltwater lagoon. After failing to act our age all day I took Aaron home, and then the day finished with Audrey and me enjoying a fancy dinner at sunset.

Today I got up to see the sunrise, came back to wake Audrey up for breakfast, and now we’re off for one last chance to feed the koi before heading to the airport for our next adventure after five excellent days in Kauai.

Underwater koi in Kauai.

The Garden Island

Posted from Poipu, Kauai, Hawaii at 7:41 pm, August 30th, 2022

My parents are back in Kauai for their biennial trip, and Audrey, Aaron and me are here to join them. Today is day four of our trip, so I’ve obviously been terrible about writing journal entries. To remedy that, here’s a recap of the trip so far:

  1. Day one saw us arrive and purchase obscene quantities of seared Ahi from the Koloa Fish Market. If you ever visit Kauai, put this place on your list, the Ahi is ridiculously good. From there we checked into our hotel and I spent more time in the lazy river and waterslide than is generally acceptable for a man in his forties.
  2. On day two we jumped in the sea to do some snorkeling over at the reef near the Beach House restaurant. There was a bit of current parallel to the coast, and I made the unfortunate decision to exit the water onto some rocks rather than fighting the current back to our entry point; I’ve got a few new battle scars on my foot, hand and ribs to show for it, but we nevertheless had fun seeing an array of fish including an oriental flying gurnard that Audrey spotted. My parents arrived in the evening after a delayed flight and a myriad of other misadventures, so we joined them for rum drinks at sunset to help them forget their troubles.
  3. Day three Audrey joined me for a morning scuba, leaving my parents to enjoy the massive breakfast buffet that is included in our hotel rate; my dad seemed to at least temporarily forget about the trip’s problems when faced with an omelette bar and a few dozen other breakfast choices. The currents were strong on our first dive but we still saw a few sharks, many turtles, and a bunch of other neat critters. After a rough surface interval that saw a couple of divers returning their breakfasts we jumped back into the water at Sheraton Caverns, which I previously referred to as “sea turtle wonderland“. That moniker held true again, as we saw dozens of turtles resting in the collapsed lava tubes as we swam around.
  4. Today was an opportunity to go on an adventure with my brother, so based on a recommendation from the dive master we set off for the Nu’alolo trail, a 7.5 mile round trip that descended from the forests above Waimea Canyon down to the turret-like buttes of the Napali Coast, two thousand feet above the Pacific. We’re pretty sure “Nu’alolo” is Hawaiian for “slippery mud”, but the views at the end were definitely worth it.

Video from Audrey of a sea turtle heading for a nap at Sheraton Caverns.

Another of Audrey’s video of a moray at Sheraton Caverns.