The Adventures of Sunsette -- Texas Travels, Part II— Apr. 12

[Alliecat]

"Hi everyone!  Thanks for reading!  Mum says, wikiwiki  and finish telling the story so she can delete all the copies of photos she made for us to post that are filling up her laptop.  OK, OK, I'll hurry.
"Yes, we rather liked that idea of living on a boat.  It would have to be a big boat though.  And how very sad about the cats.  They have hard lives sometimes, and some people should not have pets."

"OK, hana hou, one more time, and we're on our way again.  We'll be awake a very long time, but Mum didn't want to waste our last day sleeping.  As if we could!  We're on our way to Haleakala, the 'house of the sun'... but that cloud deck doesn't look promising."





"Up the very long, very winding road.  It was very strange to pause here and think that we were sitting just under the underside of a cloud."



"We're at the visitor center at 7000 feet.  The 'ahinahina is very endangered.  It can live up to 50 years, but after blooming once, it dies.  There are different kinds on each island.  And this one is we-sized!"



"There is life on the barren-looking lava."



"On, up into the clouds, we pass 8000 feet..."



"Yep, that's snow.  There was quite a bit during the (ahem) 'cold spell' they had while we were there.  We thought Mum should get out and make a snowball, but there wasn't really anywhere to get off the road and none of us were that enthused about snow."



"FIRST PULLIPS TO SUMMIT HALEAKALA!!!  Woooo!!!!!  (OK, we got a drive, but are you gonna dispute our claim?)  Here we are at 10,023 feet.  Unfortunately it was a dense and freezing cloud and we couldn't see a thing.  Look how wet we are from the fog!  We shivered a bit, looked at the placards in the visitor station, and with a shrug about the weather, started back down again.  Mum has pictures from last time.... we know what it's supposed to look like...
"Maybe we'll have better weather... next time...??"




"Here we are at Leleiwi Overlook.  Do we look cold?  Mum was afraid we'd blow off the edge."



"You could start to see a little bit again here.  But maybe not enough, for the guy who drove his car right over the curb into the parking lot and lost a hubcap. "



"All we saw was hints of the landscape below."



"The endangered Nene ('nay nay') is related to the Canada Goose, but unlike other geese, their feet aren't completely webbed, which makes it easier walking on the rough terrain they live on.  They usually mate for life.  They face many threats from predators, cars, and avian malaria, and there were once as few as 30.  Conservation efforts have raised the population to 2500-3000.  It's the Hawaiian state bird."



"We're on our way down the mountain as the day dwindles.  Here's a view toward Lanai..."



"...and the west Maui mountains.  See the little roadway down there?"



"West Maui mountains again."

"And with that, the last of the daylight ebbed away... we had to head for the airport.  We were so sad.  How could it be that we had to leave...?"
"We had a red-eye out of Maui at 9:45.  Mum couldn't sleep.  Far below, the moonlight made cloud shadows on the sea, and once in a while we saw little specks of boat lights."


"Here we are at LAX somewhere around 4:30 a.m."



"Aaaand, we have a WINNER!!  All-time grand prize winner for the worst priced airport food EVAAAHH!!  2 little wraps and this yogurt thingie were $27 CAD.  Mum ran out of food already so she had to.  But even worse, Montreal customs guy made her throw away the second wrap she hadn't eaten yet because God forbid, there were BACON BITS IN IT."



"On our way again, we started seeing stuff like this.  Yeah, the white dusting is pretty, but, nope.  According to the seatback map, we're over Colorado and that's the Rio Grande."



"More of the white stuff and Mum stopped writing down where we were, but housing density like that makes us claustrophobic."



"We'd get banned from the board for profanity if I wrote anything that Mum said for the next while."



"Crashed in a hotel cos we can't get a ferry home tonight.  We were awake 31+ hours (or thereabouts) by now.  (Well, Mum was.  Aloalo and I could nap in our case, haha.)"



"Some of you may recall from our 'Dispatches From the Field' segment that this is what we came home to.  These are the faces of despair.  WHYYYYYYYYY??!??!"



"...Geez, Alo... where do we even start with all these bills...??..."