Cedar Breaks Photo Journal

Wildflowers at Devil's Castle Peak

Kevin and Dad with summer wildflowers in front of Devil's Castle Peak at Albion Basin. We invented our own hike up toward the mountain and back toward Cecret Lake. My dad says this is his new favorite hike.

Underwater Pictures

I think this is the last of the Hawaii posts. Kevin bought a disposable camera in a waterproof case for us to take to Hawaii so that we wouldn't ruin our other camera. Here are the highlights from the roll:

Our first snorkel spot by the Aquarium on Maui

Some fish

Angel fish and a rainbow fish

Sea turtles

A playful couple

And...

Some kind of Sea Monster.

Day 7:Pearl Harbor

We had to plan our last day in Hawaii more carefully, because our flight left at 10:00 at night, and we didn't want to be wearing wet swimming suits home on our red eye flight. Kevin read about a short drive up the mountain from Honolulu that was supposed to be sort of like the Road to Hana on Maui, so we decided to do that. First, though, we stopped by Leonard's bakery for the second morning in a row to get some malasadas diliciosas. Some of the best baked Hawaiian goods are from Portuguese sailors, including Hawaiian bread, but these malasadas were something else: sugar, cinnamon sugar, or banana, coconut, or chocolate filled. Here's a great shot of me and the Leonard's bakery dumpster.

And here we are driving up the road to Round Top, above Honolulu.

And this is what the road was like as we drove around. It sprinkled on us a bit, and the whole place smelled like flowers. I'd love to live up here!

In the afternoon we decided to go to Pearl Harbor. It's free to get in, but Kevin and I decided it was worth it to spring for the $5 audio tour as we went through the museum and waited our turn to see the film and ride the boat out to the Arizona memorial. I think the audio tour was totally worth it. I'm a bit of an NPR-junkie, so I've grown accustomed to learning through listening to compiled audio snippets and vignettes told by those who experienced these attacks over 65 years ago.

I'd been to Pearl Harbor once or twice before, but this time it had a lot more meaning to me. Before I was so young that I accepted history as fact and didn't question why things happened the way they did. But this time I was immensely curious to know why the Japanese thought it would be a good idea to bomb the U.S. (we had stopped selling them oil and had closed off the Panama Canal to them, so they thought they'd take out our Pacific fleet and then quickly take over all of the resource-rich French Asian territories before we had time to regroup), or why we hadn't detected the planes coming in (we thought they were our own planes coming from California), or why Japan joined with Germany and Italy (with the invasion of France, these French colonies were ripe for the picking by Japan).

Here's what remains of one of the gun towers of the sunken USS Arizona.

This was also a neat experience for me because my grandpa served as a colonel in WWII in Asia, and despite that I've always studied and learned more about the European side of the war, and here I got to immerse myself in a totally new perspective.

Days 5 and 6: North Shore

Going to the North Shore of Oahu was my favorite part of our vacation. My brother and sister-in-law had recommended spending a day on the North Shore, and I'm so glad we did. This place was so great for what Kevin and I love about Hawaii that we decided to come back the second day and basically do everything all over again! So that's why I'm combining these two posts together--the only difference is that the second day my sunburn was so bad (see pictures below) that I wore a shirt and shorts the whole day, and we did a lot less swimming.

This day couldn't have gone more perfectly. We started off by going to a bakery in Haleiwa and then snorkeling at Shark's Cove. I'll post underwater pictures from that later. We then drove past the Beach Boys-famed Waiamea Bay (where in the winter the waves measure 20 feet from the back--that's 40 feet from the front) and went to Sunset Beach, which is our favorite beach. We snorkeled and swam a bit there and then returned to Haleiwa for lunch and delicious shaved ice. One thing we noticed about the North Shore are these stickers, "Keep the country country," which essentially means that they don't want to ruin the lax feeling of the North Shore by building a bunch of uppity resorts. And I think this remote, relaxed feeling, this private beach feeling, is what made Kevin and I love this place so much.

After lunch, we headed to "turtle beach," where the water is a bit more shallow, the water a bit more algae-like, and where sea turtles love to congregate. We saw one on the shore and about seven in the water as we snorkeled around. They're a threatened species, so we couldn't touch them, but we could go right up to them and sit next to them and they didn't mind! The only concern of mine was that a big wave would push one into me.

After turtle beach we decided to grab some picnic dinner at the supermarket--a baguette, pre-sliced meat and cheese, Coke, and an Asian salad--and then head to Ted's Bakery for some famous coconut chocolate cream pie to eat on Sunset beach inbetween wave jumping and watching the sun go down.

Days 3 and 4: Maui to Oahu and PCC

The next two days of Hawaii were very busy days. Kevin and I woke up early at our Lahaina resort to take one last dip in the ocean that was right outside our door. As I've mentioned before, the water in Hawaii is oh so warm, even at 7:30 in the morning. We swam for about 45 minutes, and then headed in to shower, pack, and head off to the airport. We arrived around lunchtime in Honolulu and headed out to our Waikiki hotel. Here I am on the balcony.

We spent some time getting settled in, and then decided to walk around Waikiki. This location has a completely different feel than any place we'd been to on Maui. For one thing, it's crowded. There are tons of tourists here. Everything is in both English and Japanese, and it's very upscale. It would be a great place for high-end shopping, as we had Prada, Saks, and many other of the like right on our street. Our hotel was also right next to the International Market (a large flea market), which was a lot of fun (and a lot more affordable too!). We grabbed some lunch there and kept on with our walking tour.

We ate at a great restaurant right on the beach, and they even gave us free dessert because we told them we were celebrating Kevin's graduation from law school. That was one thing that we were constantly asked on this trip: Is it your honeymoon? Your anniversary? One guy who was selling surfing lessons on Waikiki asked us if we were celebrating, and I randomly replied, "Yes. We're celebrating our love," all seriously. Ah. Great times. After dinner we walked along Waikiki and watched all the surfers while the sun went down.

The next day we planned to go to the Polynesian Cultural Center all the way out in Laie. Our guidebook described Laie the farthest place from Waikiki in both geography and culture. The town is very predominantly LDS, complete with an LDS temple, BYU Hawaii, and the Polynesian Cultural Center, in which 70% of their employees are BYU Hawaii students. We stopped by BYU Hawaii first to see what the campus was like. It was humorously strange the way that the carpets, tables, chairs, and even building exteriors were so much like the BYU Provo campus. It really felt like I was back in Utah. We stopped by the bookstore where I picked up the Jack Johnson CD I love and Kevin got a shirt and hat. We were pretty disappointed they didn't have Hawaii-specific BYU pens, notepads, folders, etc., but it's all on a pretty small scale. After that, we hopped over to the temple to tour the grounds.

Straight down from the temple is the beach with a famous arch where a Tsunami blew a hole right through a fin. I was captivated by the way the water hit the rocks. That figure moving around way out there is Kevin.

After that we headed over to the Polynesian Cultural Center, where they are set up in eight or so little villages representing the various regions of Polynesia (Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, etc.). They go to a lot of detail, and the buildings in those villages are even made of the same materials as their real-life counterparts. We watched cultural presentations of pit fires, stick-started fires, palm tree climbing, coconut husking and cracking, guitar and ukulele playing, and lots of dancing. Below is a shot from the afternoon canoe show, where each village presents a couple of traditional dances on canoes.

And here's Kevin outside a Fiji building holding a Noni Fruit. He has this thing with the Tahitian Noni building in Provo, with the very large picture of the guy blowing a conch shell.

When we were through touring the villages, we headed off to our traditional Hawaiian luau (rated the best by the guide books, despite the lack of alcohol) where we sat with some really nice people from Ohio and ate a pig that had been roasting underground. After that we went to the night show, where we saw more dancing from the different islands and men who danced with fire and weren't afraid to sit on it. Lots of fun laughs.

Day 2: Road to Hana Part 2

Back to the Road to Hana. This was honestly one of my favorite days in Hawaii, and even if we go back soon, I would do this drive all over again.

My favorite part of this drive was a tiny village called Nahiku. Kevin and I drove down the road there and parked across from the park and the little village church, which reminded me so much of little pioneer churches you see in the Midwest.

We walked further down the road and over a bridge to a beautiful view of the ocean. What was so great about this spot is that off to the left and down about 15 steps there was a little shady freshwater waterfall and pool separated by some boulders from the ocean. It was so awesome, and I think we could have spent all day there.

Back along the Hana Highway, we stopped in a the Black Sands beach at a state park and got out enough to get some very big grains of black lava sand in our sandals. Apparently these beaches are formed by harsh waves crashing against the lava, and they are formed in a matter of days. Most don't have a safe bay to maintain them, so they usually quickly fade away, although this particular one has been around for centuries.

We stopped by Hana Harbor for some hamburgers and continued on to the "Seven Sacred Pools" in a National Park there. I first heard about these pools on a Meg Ryan movie, IQ, but apparently the name was totally a marketing ploy (there aren't seven distinct pools, and they've never been sacred as far as we could tell). This was a great hangout--more waterfalls and freshwater pools overlooking the ocean. It was the weekend, so there were a lot of locals there swimming and it was a bit crowded. We were satisfied with this as our destination and turned around to make it back to Lahaina for some quick pasta and a restful night's sleep.

Nor Live So Long

I'm going to interrupt the Hawaii travelogue to talk our Cedar City trip last weekend. It was a brief trip, just two nights, for the Utah Shakespearean Festival. Usually we like to stay longer and do more hiking and see more plays, but the Hawaii trip ate up a lot of our vacation. Also, we really missed our friends, the Billings, who weren't able to make it with us.

We saw King Lear. This has been my favorite play for about five years now. I fell in love with it in my graduate Shakespeare class, where we focused on the Puritan influence on Shakespeare's plays and were required to read the original quarto and folio play versions from Early English Books Online (EEBO). King Lear is generally to considered to be in Shakespeare's top four best tragedies (with Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet being the other three), and for me it generates emotion like no other play does. Each of these four tragedies seems more focused on the psychology of the human mind than the outward action or plot, which also happens to be reason that I don't care that Shakespeare borrowed almost all of his plots. His characters, and their ways of expressing themselves (including what John Keats called negative capability), are what truly matters. In addition to this type of play reading/hearing, King Lear provokes emotions in me that seem outside reason and analysis.

Take the first scene, for example. In the past, I've been annoyed by Cordelia and her refusal to play to her elderly father's wishes to publicly proclaim her affection for him. But the way this was played Saturday, I believed more that she believed at that time that she could not utter vain falsehoods—that it was too much against her nature. And Lear himself is another issue: I have a friend who is amazed I can sympathize with Lear after his hubris is so blatantly exposed and wrath so easily kindled against those who love him most. I mean, in the first five minutes he's disowned the only child who loves him and banished his most faithful counselor. But it's because of these fatal errors, and the way Cordelia and Kent forgive him so easily and so completely, that I gain hope for the general situation, and it is that hope that is shattered at the end. There's nothing as depressing as saying that even forgiveness, loyalty, and understanding won't be enough in the end.

I think what makes King Lear so appealing is the way that characters who are so unlike me are able to draw me in and make me empathize with them. Edmund is very funny, and I feel bad for him after hearing Gloucester talk about his illegitimate condition in such a mocking way. Goneril and Regan have some legitimate reason to fear their father's rash judgments and orders, Lear and Gloucester both trust and disown too easily, and the others are just trying reclaim a situation gone completely wrong.

When I watched the Ian Holm version at my professor's house years ago, the most emotional scene for me was the last one, where Lear brings in his beloved daughter and seeks to see her revived. The utter despair of that moment when he realizes that she will no longer live: "Never, never, never, never, never!" was almost too much for me.

In the performance last Saturday, another moment in the play surprised me with its emotional density. It's where Lear and Gloucester meet in their torn-down states and finally recognize each other. I had been watching carefully to see how Gloucester's role was treated. He was played by the same actor I'd seen play Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor last year, and I was wondering how such a good comic could pull off this tragic character. He was amazing. The agony I was in as I watched him get his eyes poked out, and the sorry state of his blindness and attempted suicide, combined with the caring of his disguised son Edgar, made Gloucester's condition so sweetly sad. And at last, when Lear and Gloucester, these two great ruined men, recognized each other in their horrible state and came together in understanding, it was truly an amazing experience to witness.

Ukulele

OK, here's one of those embarrassing things that I've posted at Kevin's request. In Hawaii I took a simple 3-minute ukulele (say: oo-koo-lay-lay) lesson to learn how to play the four chords in "You Are My Sunshine": C, C7, G, and G7. And here's my imperfect performance, recorded on its side. With awkward pauses and early chord switches, I don't think I'll be quitting my day job any time soon.

Day 2: Road to Hana, Part 1

Our second full day in Hawaii we drove on the road to Hana. This is a journey drive, not a destination drive: the drive is the entire point of the day. This road goes along the coastline of the northwestern part of the island and weaves in and out, going over many streams and waterfalls, and exposing us to the lush, green side of Maui.

We started out early to beat the traffic, although it was pretty uncrowded the whole way. We stopped early on the drive to do a hike/adventure to the Four Waterfalls. This was a little crazier than expected. The trail was nice and muddy, and the bamboo was thick (we had some tight squeezes). Most of the hikers we saw gave up and turned around, but we were determined to do it. I was just glad that there weren't any dangerous creatures lurking around in that crazy forest! There are a lot of crazy alternate trails running everywhere, so we probably didn't go exactly the right way, but we saw some beautiful waterfalls in the process, even though we were probably on the wrong side of the stream and the river was a little high and fast to cross (I think there had been recent heavy rains because the waterfall water was a little murky).

After our hike, we stopped at the Keanae Arboretum. Kevin and I are members of the Red Butte Arboretum here in Utah, and we love looking at plants whether desert or tropical. This was a fun, short little stroll even though it sprinkled on us a little. We had the whole place to ourselves, basically, and the vegetation was beautiful.

Ka'anapali Beach at Sunset

We got to experience this two nights in a row. Totally amazing.

Day 1: Kehei, Wailea, and Lahaina

All right! I've heard the chant for more Hawaii pictures, and I'm more than happy to share them. Hey, at least you chose to visit this site where I talk about my vacations, rather than coming over to my house where I bombard you with slide shows, like the old cliche. I've started on our first full-day in Maui. We arrived about 2:00 p.m. the day before, but we spent most of our time getting settled in around the resort.

We woke up at 6:00 a.m. to get some good snorkeling in. We were told the best spots where in Wailea, south of Kehei, so we dropped by the Safeway to get some sweet Portuguese/Hawaiian bread and some guava juice and headed out from Lahaina.

The first two spots were quite a hike to get to, and I was glad I bought some serious Merrell hiking sandals, with a good hiking-boot sole, to climb over the very jagged lava. It was a windy day, so it was a challenge to not fall over on our sharp surroundings while carrying all of our gear. The first place we stopped was here:

Kevin and I tried out our snorkeling where we were all alone, which was good. I hadn't snorkeled in years, and never with my contact lenses in before, so this was a new experience for me. Kevin had never been, so we both had to get used to the breathing, the snapping sound the microscopic shrimp make in the water, and swimming over deep ocean canyons. Pretty soon, though, we realized that when your head's in the salt water, you just float without much "swimming" at all. Our first stop was great, with a good concentration of fish and a couple of large schools in such a tiny place. We then moved on to the Aquarium, which was more populated by people, but had a lot more room to explore.

After a morning of snorkeling in Wailea, we headed into Kihei where we ate at the Pupu lounge ("pupu" is the Hawaiian word for appetizer). Upon my brother and sister-in-law's recommendation, we ordered the pupu platter, a delicious array of pot stickers, crab cakes, won tons, steak, chicken, and shrimp with sauces. The part that was the most fun (besides eating good food) is that the platter came with a little grill that we cooked everything on to have it sizzling when we ate it.

We then went to the "White Rock Beach," which has some other Hawaiian name. This beach is Brooke's favorite. Let me just take a moment to praise Hawaii beaches. The beaches are so beautiful here, and the sand is so soft. They don't have the high and low tide thing going on here like they do in California, so the beaches are clean and all sand, rather than cluttered with seaweed. This has a couple of important benefits: you don't get nasty seaweed wrapping around your leg when you go wading, and the beaches smell wonderful (it's the seaweed that makes 'em stink). Then, there's the fact that Hawaii has warm ocean currents instead of cold ones. This means that the ocean feels like a heated pool--all of the time. It's cool and refreshing, but warm to the touch. Also, there are a number of beaches like this one that aren't crowded at all, and they feel like a large private beach. Swimming here, Kevin and I saw our first wild sea turtle who swam right by us, hitting the surface for a breath.

When we got back to our condo in Lahaina on Ka'anapali Beach, we had this beautiful sunset just right outside our doorstep. Yes, we stayed at a resort, but we feel like it was a good one (The Whaler) with a little shopping mall and restaurants that had good reviews in our guide book, Maui Revealed.

There is a gorgeous walk along this beach at sunset. You can take your walk along a paved pathway or on the beach (we did both). After checking out this gorgeous sunset, we headed over to the mall, where I got my free color-changing tote bag from Del Sol (actually a Utah-based company) and we bought macadamia nut shortbread cookies from the Honolulu Cookie Company. After that, we went back to Leilani's on the Beach, the oceanfront restaurant we also went to the night before, to get their delicious ono fish tacos (made with real ono, that is--a delicious white fish) and hula pie.