Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

After breakfast, I headed back to the volcano one last time to see if there were any updates. The ranger told me that there was a new bulge in the floor of the Hulema'uma'u crater. It was about a mile in diameter... and the thickness of a dime. I stopped by the Jaggar museum and observatory to look at the seismometers. Not surprisingly, they showed a pattern that indicates lots of magma movement. There's a chance that there will be a major eruption soon, but most of these events subside without surface activity.

On the way back to Kona for my flight out, I stopped by South Point. As the name suggests, it's the southernmost point on the Big Island, and therefore the southernmost point in the 50 states. There's a rocky promontory there. Big waves crash against old volcanic stone and form neat little tide pools. I couldn't quite see to Antarctica.

I had some time in Kailua, so I did a little shopping and got my underwater pictures developed. There was a mixup at the rental place. They'd had a customer return a car earlier and had confused our tickets. Normally, my name is unique enough to avoid that, but this guy was "Ameet Narayan", which is pretty close if your handwriting is a little vague. I paid less for this three day rental than for a single day of my first rental. Now I'm sitting at the Kona airport, waiting for them to open the gate for my flight. The announcements here are in both English and Japanese. I wonder how many airports in the US do that.