Being directionally challenged as I am, I have no real idea of what direction is what. Ryan tells me we spent most of yesterday on the East side of the island. Since he is NOT directionally challenged, I take his word for it.

We got to see the steam venting off the crater yesterday morning! The mist burned off relatively quickly, and we were treated to a view very similar to the one we saw on Saturday.

Those photos would have worked better if I’d stood in the same spot when taking them, but you get the general idea.

After going back to the house for breakfast, and then back again for our long pants for stargazing, we were off to the Hilo area. We had decided to visit the botanic gardens and a vanilla plantation before going to the meet up spot for the stars. We were scraped off for probably 30 minutes on an “old hippy” selling tea off the side of the road. Everything they sell is hand harvested and processed. He had a basket of tea that he was de-leafing for what would become green tea, and off to the side were trays of hibiscus seeds, drying in the sun. It was a lot of fun chatting with him and sampling tea.

After that we went the rest of the way to the botanic gardens (The Hawaii Tropical Bioreserve and Garden). After a VERY steep climb down a ramp, it leveled out mostly and we were able to look around us more.

There were so many different orchids! We took pictures of a few, and then there were just too many to keep up with!

A few really pretty waterfalls, and then down to the edge of the island where the ocean crashed against the Twin Rocks. I’m not sure why they’re called twins. Legend has it that the island was being invaded and needed protecting, so the chief asked for volunteers. Some young lovers said they’d do it, so they went down to the beach while everyone else stayed at home overnight (on pain of death). The next morning when the the chief went to check on them and found them turned into two large, mostly separated, rocks. The chief declared that anyone trying to get past them with the water churning around them would die trying to get to shore. The lovers, and their offspring guard the beach to this day, fending off invaders with the violence of the waters around them.

And then there was the excruciating climb back to the top. They had benches on the side all the way up, but I didn’t dare sit down for fear that going the rest of the way would then be much harder!

After that, we found the beach area the old guy with the tea told us about during out chat. We sat there and ate our sandwiches, and watched the tide start to come in.

It was about 3:45 when we finally headed for the vanilla plantation and realized that it closed at 3:00! However, it was on our way to the star gazing spot, so we decided to go anyway, just in case. Maybe the 3:00 pm closing time was only for tours? No, they do actually close at 3:00, but the door was open so we went in and even though they really were actually closed, they were ok with us wandering around the shop, asking questions, and of course, buying their wares. That plantation is the only vanilla plantation in the United States!

Nearing 5:00, we headed toward the meeting spot for stargazing and were treated to some interesting views along the way. While on the hillside of the plantation, it felt like we were in the mountains of Colorado. Until we were able to see the ocean again. And then it was sort of like New Mexico, Southern Colorado, and parts of Arizona. And then! It was like the rolling hills of Nebraska, except the road didn’t cut through them in a flat manner, it was more of a tilt, so “sideways Nebraska.”

The meetup spot for stargazing turned out to be a lava field. It looked like an explosion of lava rock, and was incredibly surreal in the fading sunlight. We were there nearly an hour early, which gave us time to put on our long pants, sweatshirts, and jackets. Jupiter was the first “star” to make an appearance, even while the glow from the fading sunset was behind us. I tried to take a picture, tried looking at it with my binoculars, but without a tripod, that was an abject failure. The planet looked like a heart rate monitor run amok with all the movement from my arm!

Shortly before everyone was to arrive, our guide, James, called. He had decided to move the spot to a place about 20 minutes away which was grassy instead of rocks. So we drove over there.

And the stars. There were so many of them visible! We were on the side of Maura Kea, which is designated a level 2 on the Bortle scale (a 9 level scale that measure the night sky’s brightness in a particular location). Level 1 is the absolute darkest on Earth. Our guide was previously an “analog astronaut,” which is a fancy way of saying he got to play at being an astronaut living on Mars. There’s a NASA set up in Hawaii where they try to simulate conditions people would need to live in on Mars to work out some kinks before we all actually head that direction. He’s also an astrophotographer, and brought out his green laser pointer to show us things like the Zodiac constellations which were visible, as well as where Hilo and Kona were in relation to where we were. And then the fun stuff started. He set up his star tracker with his camera so we could see the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, as well as the Orion and Running Man nebulas. We could actually sort of see the Andromeda galaxy without the camera, well, some of us could. It was a very faint blurry spot which could be seen out of out of the corner of the eye while looking at a nearby star. I might have seen it? There were a lot of somewhat blurry stars out there!

And then finally, extended exposure pictures of us with the Milky Way. (coming soon – I don’t have the link to download those yet!)