Hawaii Jan 3-6

Sup kids, so the work part of this trip is now over. The NSF symposium was FANTASTIC. I presented some work I’ve done with the high-altitude balloon launch, and learned a lot from my fellow…fellows.

Even though I was not attending the AAS (not gonna put the acronym, just look it up), I still was able to catch up with some very good friends of mine. First off, huge shout out to my buddy Loomis for crushing it and getting a full time job at NRAO. If he can do it, then I at least still got a shot! We also got to hang out with Alysha, who controls some big ass telescopes down South. She is crushing it as well.

The unexpected highlight was that Bae and I were reunited with CJ Vargas and Hailey. You might know that CJ and I had a band called Mischief Night where we made some pretty word music. Anyway, after 2.5 days of some hardass work, it was time to get back to vacay.

Here are a few more sunset pics cuz that’s what we did before eating some dope food those few nights:

Jan 6 – To Kona

So the plan all along was to fly to Kona and meet my parents, Father Freedom and Mother Martha Washington (FF and MMW, respectively) on this day. They arrived on Jan 5. In case your geography is terrible, Kona is on West side of the big island. Honolulu is on a different island.

We ended up getting to the airport wayyyyy too early, but right when we finished grabbing some breakfast, we heard on the intercom that there was room on an early flight to Kona. So we jumped on that.

This meant that we arrived in Kona 90 minutes before we originally planned, which was dope. FF and MMW picked us up and we went to check out this NPS spot nearby, where we did a nice little hike. We crossed some lava flows and made it to the beach, where we immediately saw sea turtles.

After we hit this spot up, we headed South to our airbnbeastin’ ricky in Captain Cook. Don’t know much about that town, but sure sounds like it is named after some white British Dude. How sunburnt you think that dude got when he showed up here????

On the way to the airbnb, we stopped at Big Jake’s BBQ place. It was EXTREMELY delicious, but EXTREMELY slow. There was just the one woman working. Food was totally worth the wait, though. Here’s a picture of that:

Then we hit the grocery store hard to stock up for the next few days. You know, beer ‘n stuff.

We showed up to the airbnb, unpacked the car, then went straight to the beach. We have access to our own semi-private beach here, which RULES compared to Disney World Honolulu Waikiki Betch.

We used the last few hours of daylight to go snorkeling and watch the sunset. I used the gear recommended by Big Papa Makuch, and man did that shit work well.

I put together a shitty video here of what we saw while snorkeling here.

And damn, here is another sunset. This was the best one we’ve seen so far. I don’t think I got a very good picture because I’m not good at taking photos, and I was also pretty focussed on just watching and enjoying.

We also saw a whale. Bae even saw that shit BREACH!!!! Pretty jealous I didn’t catch that.

Fantastic day and I can’t wait to see what we get into tomorrow. The plan is to head back up towards Captain Cook and find sharks or swim with big boi manta rays. Sounds pretty cool.

Reflections from Bae: “I like the Big Island much more! Fewer people!” I agree.