We let people have a few free hours in the morning. A few slept
in or stayed at the hotel, most went downtown Hilo to shop, and Liz and
I went to do food shopping. First, we went to Borders and had coffee.
Then, we bought more than $200 worth of food for lunches and breakfast.
Finally, we went to Office Max to get some protractors for the mapping
exercise. We returned to the hotel by 10:30 and met the rest of the
group at 11:00. We got out of town, after gassing up and headed down
Route 130 toward Kapoho. Our first stop was at Lava Tree State Monument.
It was raining when we arrived so we ate lunch in the parking lot.
The rain subsided and we took a leisurely stroll through the lava trees,
pausing to photograph groups of lava tree huggers.
The lava trees formed when a very fluid basaltic lava flow entered the forest and engulfed the trees. Some lava cooled around the trees and remained behind after the rest of it continued to flow downhill. It is relatively uncommon that lavas are fluid enough to do this. Usually, they are viscous enough to simply knock the tree over. The rain picked up again as we left. After a brief stop across from the Geothermal Power Station, we drove through Kapoho and across the 1960 lava flow that partially destroyed the town. I was surprised to see all of the gray moss that has covered the flow since I was last there in 1983. We followed the road until it hit the coast, stopping to collect a sample of coarse, black sand at Isaac Hale Beach. The surf was very rough. We drove to Kalapana, along the old Chain of Craters road, where the lava flows, since 1983, blocked the road. A native woman, Julie Aho, was selling a variety of handmade crafts that she and her husband had made. They made a fortune off of us. I bought a beret for Joan and a tapa cloth painting of a volcano. Elise talked me into buying a basalt bead necklace, which I now wear around my neck. It started raining very hard so we drove back to Hilo. I showed everyone how to use the protractors to complete the mapping project. It turned out that the intersection angles were too shallow because the baseline wasn’t long enough so there were varying degrees of success. We had an excellent Thai dinner at the Royal Siam restaurant. We ordered quite a variety and all of it was excellent. Everyone seemed particularly enamoured with the Thai tea. Some students walked back to the hotel during a respite in the downpours. We chatted on the Lanais until about 10:30 when I turned in. It has been interesting to watch the people in my van bonding together.
Elise discovered that Todd George translates to Koka Keoki in Hawaiian.
Somehow this spawned a new ersatz religion with Koka as its head.
We are all having fun with it. Koka was born on 3/11/02.
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