A week....already?

Continuing with my every-now-and-then nature of this blog, I am back on this lazy afternoon at sea to fill you in on what we have been doing. (This isn't going to take long).

The weather has continued to improve on a daily basis. What started out as a cool and rocky Pacific has become the warm, humid and smooth Pacific, and for the last two days has turned the most beautiful shade of sapphire blue. We've partly cloudy skies today, which means bright blue sky interspersed with big puffy white clouds....very similar to our New Mexico skies. Folks are out on deck for the last two days, sunning in the loungers and watching the big screen and ocean.

We have attended quite a few of the enrichment lectures, not so many of the games/crafts/ukelele/hula lessons. I now can tell you that the big island of Hawaii is the youngest (and still growing) of the Hawaiian islands, all five of the islands are connected below the sea having been formed by the same Hot Spot underwater, and that the full chain of Hawaiian islands stretches northwest all the way to what we know as Midway due to the movement of the Pacific tectonic plate at something like 4" per year. A Hot Spot is basically an underwater volcano, which over a very long geologic time builds up and forms a new island. And yes, there is a new island 'only' 3,000 feet below the water, forming to the bottom of the big island. The name of this newest island about to burst forth escapes me. It is something like 5 letters long with at least one i, and probably a k,l,and/or n. But since the entire Hawaiian alphabet is only 12 letters long, and 5 of those are the vowels, just pick something sort of resembling the word Liki'i. or Kilei. or Iliki. Or google it, if you really want to know. Just don't hold your breath because we're still talking geologic time frames, here.

I do know that there are two types of lava flow, the first being a'a, which is sort of looks like little charcoal briquets tumbling over on each other. The second type looks like syrup, all liquid and gooey. Its name is much longer, but it will come as no surprise that I cannot remember it, nor can I remember a nui nui from akai akai or pono kui kui. One of those is probably the name of a bird or maybe a rainbow. In fact, despite a Hawaiian word of the day session every day, the only two words I have learned all week are 'pono' which sort of means the same thing as the Navajo 'walk in beauty' and 'makai', which is supposed to mean 'towards the water'. I am not going to embarass myself further and attempt to attend any of the Hawaiian language classes onboard, because I would only mangle things worse than I already have and instead of saying 'Pleased to meet you' it would come out closer to 'Your monkey is eating my taco'.

Tomorrow we arrive in Hilo and will be visiting Volcano National Park and seeing some lava flows. It sounds dangerous until you realize lava has been flowing out of Kilauea for 33 years, continuously. They have grown used to making permanent road detours, finding valleys filled in and building on top after it all cools off. It should be a fun day.