Getting to Hawaii

Our longest distance travel for the year was to the Big Island of Hawaii this month. We flew from Baltimore to Minneapolis to Honolulu to Kona…and it took almost the whole day. We left our house just after 6 AM EST and got into the Kona airport well after sunset.

The most interesting leg of the flight was from Minneapolis to Honolulu because I had a window seat and took pictures. The mountains of the wester USs how red cliffs with shadow and snow fields,

Watersheds with dendritic patterns unto values dusted by snow,

Stair steps of rock with flat places lightened with snow,

A rock formation that looked like a giant eye…underlined with the convoluted path of a river, and

Differential snow accumulation of round irrigation fields (Why do some have snow and some look like bare earth? Did the farmer plow the snow into the earth?)

I saw the boundary between the western coast of the US and then the Pacific Ocean. It seem abrupt and I decided to read rather than look down at the ocean. As we got closer – I began to take pictures of the islands as we flew into Honolulu.

It was easy to see where the water was shallow…where it got deeper.

Oahu has some very dense development.

But there are still parts where the mountains come down to the sea.

We had a little time in the Honolulu airport. We bought dinner just before all the restaurants closed for the night! We flew over to Kona after dark and walked into the steamy terminal - covered but open air. Our baggage came quickly; I barely had time to photograph a large snail in one of the planters.

And so our Hawaiian adventure began!