Hawaii: Rainbows and Volcanoes

It was raining the morning of our second whale watch, and there was a rainbow in the sky as we drove to the harbor in Lahaina. Sometimes we could see a faint second rainbow. (Sorry about the bugs on the windshield!)

When we got to the harbor we could still see the rainbow.

In fact it soon became obvious to us that the fabled pot of gold
must be on a boat!Here's something you don't often see in the same picture — a whale tail and a rainbow!Here's a great picture from Susan's wider angle lens--she was able to get the entire rainbow.

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One afternoon we drove up to the top of the volcano, Haleakala. (Go ahead and say it. Holly-ah-kah-la. You know you want to!) It was drizzling as we started up the mountain, and the whole way there was a rainbow in front of us. But as fast as we drove, we never caught up to it. Not that we drove fast...the road had far too many hairpin turns for that.

Much to our surprise, we were still able to see a rainbow of sorts at the top of the volcano.


The sun was behind us, and the crater in front of us was filled with clouds. The sunlight on the clouds made something like a rainbow. What was really cool was that we realized the sun was casting our shadows on the clouds and there was a small rainbow around our shadows.

We had lots of fun making shadow creatures on the clouds. Later we read that the ancient Hawaiians believed that if they saw their shadow on a rainbow they were seeing their soul.

After we were done having fun with our shadows, Russ & I decided to hike down into the crater a little. Ok. I decided to hike down into the crater, and Russ was kind enough to go with me. It takes several hours to hike all of the way down, so we just went a little way.

Russ said he was pretty lightheaded because of the altitude.

One of my favorite things about the top of the volcano is the bathrooms. When Cindy Lynn and I were there we just about died laughing at these signs:
Yuck!!

We went up to the top of the volcano to watch the sun set. Gary and Susan had a romantic moment,
and Russ had an off-balance moment.

Don't worry, though. Russ & I had some romance too.

We knew that it wasn't going to be a magnificent sunset because there weren't a lot of clouds, but it was still fun to watch. When you're that close to the equator you can literally see the sun dropping over the horizon. Susan caught the best sunset picture.

Our drive back down the volcano was more of an adventure than we'd planned. It takes several hours to drive the 38 miles up to the top of Haleakala. (Although I just read something that said that the road to the Haleakala summit holds the record for climbing to the highest elevation in the shortest distance. I'm not entirely sure I wanted to know that!) When we were about 3/4 of the way up Haleakala, Russ told us that he was worried about how much gas we had. We had started the trip with 1/4 of a tank, and he assumed that would be enough. But at 3/4 of the way up the fuel gauge was showing that we had only 1/16 of a tank left, and there was no gas available on the volcano. When we started back down the volcano after the sunset, Russ's goal was to not have to use any gas on the way down. I think he only touched the accelerator two times in the 38 miles! And when we got down we still had 1/16 of a tank of gas, which we decided was a wonderful tender mercy.