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Volcano, Hawaii - Day 22

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Thursday, July 3rd Today is our last full day of sight seeing before our return trip home. As we were getting ready to leave, I snapped a couple photos in the backyard of our Air B&B.  Beautiful flowers and a cute little lizard were a great way to start my day. As we entered the park today, Mom traded in the pass she had purchased online last night and upgraded it to a senior lifetime pass.  It is hard to believe that my parents are able to get senior benefits at this point, but I am excited for her to have her lifetime pass!  It got all of the rest of us in with her, as well. We drove over to the welcome center and Desmond got his Junior Ranger packet.  Meanwhile, we got stamps for our National Parks Passports, and browsed the gift shop.   I liked this stain glass window of the volcano. Desmond started right in on his packet, and let us know a few key places we will want to visit. The first place we wanted to visit was the crater rim trail (which we had bee...

On to the Big Island - Day 21

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Wednesday, July 2nd Today we packed up and left our Air B&B around 8AM to catch an Uber ride to the airport.  While we are here we wanted to go to the Big Island and see the volcano.  It had an eruption on June 29th where, for about 11 hours, it spewed a fountain of lava into the sky more than 1000 feet tall.  This “episode” is finished, but at least we know the volcano has been active recently.  I am praying we will get to see some lava. We got on a plane for a quick flight between the islands. I enjoyed the view out the window.  The water is an amazing range of colors! One of the islands I could see out of the window was red from the iron. When we got to the Big Island, we picked up our rental car, and played Tetris putting all of our luggage in the back. Only to discover that the middle seatbelt was non-functional. So we had to trade vehicles, and reload all our luggage into another Hyundai.  This vehicle is almost identical to the front of the Santa...

Pearl Harbor - Day 20

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Tuesday, July 1 This morning we got up early again to go to Pearl Harbor. We had heard that if you are in the standby line at 7AM there is a good chance of getting to ride the boat over to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial (the reservations for which sell out months ahead of time). So that’s what we did. We looked at the exhibits while we waited to see if we would get a text back saying we could board the boat.  Desmond got his Jr. Ranger packet and started working on it as we explored the exhibits.  Bryan got the awaited text message and we made our way over to the line for the boat. We were ushered into the theater for a brief talk covering rules and regulations so that we knew what to expect as we crossed the water in this active military base, and visited the memorial atop the sunken ship.   The memorial is well done. You can look at the ship beneath the water, and read the names of those who died. There are a lot of names, and the knowledge that the deceased were entombed ...