Static

 They say that the English like talking about the weather.... but the Americans have us  beaten by a long long way. One could spend a whole day watching the weather channel or just on the news, the weather is big news, especially in this area where the climate swings wildly from frigid cold to suffocating humid heat. Hawaii doesnt have the same preoccupation with the weather, why would they? its either 27, 28, 29, 30 or 31 C every day if its hotter its 31C if its not as hot, its 27C simple. Not actually that simple, there are trade winds and rougher seas at some times of the year but you get my drift.

Big enough news, on this occasion, to make the news in the UK its the coldest snap here for 10 years, the city of Boston are running out of places to put the piles of snow, everyone is fed up with it, the Mayor was on TV telling people to stop sledding down the streets and stop jumping off roofs into snowdrifts.... you cant blame them really over 90 inches of snow in 4 weeks you have to make your own entertainment somehow.

Anyway the consequence of extreme cold, apart from the frostbite warnings, is extreme dryness in the air which equals extreme static, I am normally a static person anyway but this is ridiculous, touching the bulb on the lamp made it glow through static alone, hair stood on end, clothes crackling as you take them off. Given the extent of artificial fibres here, there must be enough energy generated to run a small town. Cats arent immune either, stroking Sierra gives her a spark when you touch her, I think her strategy is to stay still and not move about much so she doesnt generate too much static, either that or she is just lazy.

You can of course stick things to s staticky cat... packing chips, balloons etc but that would be mean to use her for our own amusement

Should have brought a hat

  Its a few years since I was here when the weather is a brutal as this, stuff happens, you forget just how bone chilling it is.  For those at work the concept of me being cold is probably a little strange, I think I have mentioned being cold maybe 6 times in 10 years but for all of you and for the record, ITS CCOLD
  The weather channel are warning people to get all their errands done this morning and prepare to hunker down for a couple of days, buses, trains, all stopping at mid day... another foot of snow forecast......luckily the forecast here is a few inches, but a few inches on ground already frozen to -10 isnt going anywhere, its going to stay on the ground and get in the way

All this leads me to conclude that I should have been a little more attentive in my packing and brought a hat , or a hoodie, I hate hoodies but with chill like this I can appreciate their uses!

So, the trip ................ I happened to sit next to a heavy drinker on the flight to Dublin and the crew refilled my drink as often as they refilled his, well thats the excuse I am using for my over consumption of gin, way over consumption as it goes.. asleep by midnight in the hotel type over consumption. The same crew on the flight back to Heathrow recognised me and tempted me into just one more, by the time the delayed flight took off it was afternoon anyway so what the heck.

Having done a route march round Heathrow to get to the B gates, I was surprised to say the least to see a 747 sitting at the gate, only to be checked for boarding in the normal manner and directed down the stairs to.......

Yes, its a bus, they had us trek all the way over to the B gates to put us on a bus that we could have caught from the bus gate in the main terminal,
 Before terminal 5 was built, we were forever being bused to the plane and bused from the plane to the terminal when we arrived, buses were never the problem... stairs were the problem, Dunc and I used to joke that with 7 hours notice of the flight arriving at Heathrow they should at least be coordinated to manage a set of drive up stairs to get down to the bus!

Sat on the plane and waited

 and waited

Finally off and the chance to see a sunset over the West coast or Ireland

I just love the things you see from up here

All things being equal

A February half term trip was easy, a combined sale with cheapest fares out of Dublin and the world is your oyster.
All things being equal... well within about £100 of each other , which would you be choosing ?

Hawaii?

Alaska?

Lisa's house?

  Yeah, I know, one would expect Alaska to be chilly at this time of year but seriously, Atco colder that Alaska??  could I have picked anywhere worse? - well actually yes......Boston !

To get to Alaska or Hawaii would mean going through Boston so actually I have picked the best option flying to Philly to see Lisa even if the dizzying heights of 2C on Tuesday is going to be the warmest it gets with 7-12cm of snow thats 4 1/2 inches

4 and a half inches of snow here and the country would grind to a halt, trains would be cancelled, airport delays, panic on the motorways, panic in the shops, panic on the news. Do they panic in the US? nope, they just shovel and plough their way out of it and carry on

Some cities have designated snow lanes, they ban parking beside the road, snowplow the white stuff off the road and onto the lanes at the side of the road- simples. Car parks are cleared by ploughing it into a couple of parking spaces at the edge of the car park, lines of snow ploughs 3 abreast clear the bigger roads and life carries on , The favourite vehicle to attach the plough to seems to be a cement mixer, in 10 years I have yet to find out why but a line of 3 cement mixers with ploughs attached isnt an unusual sight. Actually it is an unusual sight for me because American cement mixers are mounted backwards

Then there is the array of equipment for the common man, snow clearers, snow blowers, stuff you can push along, stuff you can ride, they love a good machine to clear the snow
  One year we were chatting to the pilot on the way out of the airport and he mentioned that the couple of flakes falling from the sky was going to be a massive snowstorm, he wasnt wrong, next morning 2 feet of snow greeted us in the hotel car park, Al was fascinated by the sudden appearance of the snow so we drove gingerly to Home Depot and bought him a snow shovel, he spent the next couple of days happily digging snow in the car park and Lisa's garden . It was 2006 and he was only 11 so I wont embarrass him by posting the photos of him and the snow shovelling so heres one I took out and about the same trip

Luggage
  A trip to somewhere cold needs altogether too much luggage, no way can I fit the coats, jumpers, gloves etc into hand luggage which leaves me at the mercy of the baggage handlers at 3 different airports, could be worse, Dublin only lose things, Brussels actually break them, I still have one of the 3 wheeled suitcases to prove it.
Looking back at the photos its 2010 since I last went anywhere snowy, Alaska in July is in the low 20s and only needs a jacket to keep warm in the chillier evenings so the weather is going to be a bit of a rude awakening.
    As I often try to explain to Lisa and others in the US, our climate here in the UK doesnt really need all that many changes of clothing, a couple of coats and a thick jumper or two for the coldest days and cropped trousers and sandles for the warmest days,, the rest of the time you can wear pretty much the same clothing all year round , give or take a cardigan and a brolly. Travelling to  more extremes has necessitated a whole wardrobe of clothes that have very little use at home, thick coats and gloves probably see 4 weeks use and shorts and swimsuits about the same..........no wonder all the wardrobes on American films are so big! Someone told me the other day that I have a small amount of wardrobe space "for a woman" I didnt point out that there is probably the same amount of clothes spread round the house as well,

I'm a bit wary about the flights I have had the tonsil issue again the last few days and dont really want my ears disturbed by changes in air pressure, lets hope alcohol is good at relaxing your eardrums and eustachian tubes, although I suspect the quantity required for that degree of relaxation is well beyond my "lightweight" status and even further beyond the point where it gives me heartburn!

Why is it I am such a bad weather magnet?

And Finally........... Volcano Day

  The Wifi connection at the hotel was fairly good but had problems uploading pictures, as you know I like to post a lot of pictures, for just one days entry it took overnight to upload. So I decided to wait until I got home to finish off, now frantically trying to get it done in the next hour, the last hour of 2014!

Volcano Day!
  Having been too snuffly on Xmas day itself, we headed off to the East side of the island to see the sights on boxing day

As the ground around the volcano is damaged by eruptions, there are holes formed where steam just boils out of the ground, there are a couple with fences round but the rest, the steam just oozes forth like the vent from some sort of underground railway!

Further on up the volcano, we reached the summit which was filled with angry lava a couple of years ago but now was just a steaming hole in the ground

The area where the current lava flow is way off near a small village, its trundling slowly across a road but its not a good idea to go and gawp at people when they are trying to save their houses and posessions so we headed off to see the lava flows from previous eruptions,

Very interesting to see the way the lava had flowed down the mountains and into the sea leaving black trails all the way to the cliffs edge.

The lava was glassy on top but soon weathered to the spongy looking rock underneath .

  Driving towards Hilo, I made a joke about following one of the tour buses into a turning, as we went past we noticed it was a Macadamia nut farm so we turned round and followed the coach in after all!

The factory was closed for Xmas but you could see the orchard of nut trees, the equipment they used to harvest and get a look at some of the nuts growing on the trees, well, you couldnt actually, I turned down one of the orchard paths when no one was looking so we could drive up and get a look .

  Then we trundled off across the island on the way home, through a scenic tropical forest drive......

Through some more foresty stuff......

Across the country past Mauna Kea volcano......

And off into the twilight

An aquarium visit with your clothes off

After checking out and a last minute stop in Kmart for a couple of t shirts, Al finally decided to brave it and bare it by buying a pair of swimming shorts and some goggles.  We went back to one of the beach parks we had seen before for an afternoon on the beach, .....
The sun must have been getting to us. It's not something either of us would normally do at all, most of our holidays have been non stop sightseeing for as long as I can remember.  Dunc had the sort of skin that burned really easily and didn't really do sunbathing or beaches,  a day at some race or other and he would come home with a face and neck red from the sun, while Al had sunblushed cheeks.
So, we changed into our swimming things , adjusted the goggles and toddled into the water.
  Just feet from the shore and a couple of feet down the sea is teeming with life, fish in small shoals, striped fish, a yellow and black angel fish looking thing, blue and red edged fish, corals growing, sea urchins, black and spiky waving about in the water. Not having the full snorkel gear mask and  flippers it was a bit more difficult but if you hold your breath and hang in the water you can see quite a lot, albeit in 30 second bursts.

As I said there are black spiny sea urchins, the same ones that some  TV  chef reporter was eating a couple of days earlier on America's freakiest foods, an episode which by coincidence featured Hawaii . The chef guy was saying that the tastiest bit of these little spiny creatures was the gonads,  something the urchins seem to have taken exception to because when I put my hand down to steady myself, I pulled it back out of the water with a barbed black stinger in it,  I was just biting the stinger out of my finger when I heard Al calling me, he had smacked into another of the attitude filled urchins and they had decided to get their full revenge on the food network by leaving half a dozen stings in one of his fingers.  After asking a local he was directed to the lifeguard who reassured him that they weren't poisonous and that all would be well in a couple of days. The immediate  cure for sea urchin stings is either vinegar or pee on it apparently!

Al was a little put off exploring near to the rocks but I had a bit more of a float about. Seeing life under the sea is something you can't imagine if you have never experienced it, all so close to the shore, like an aquarium visit with your clothes off!  A whole display before your eyes, I have always been a bit cautious of snorkeling because I did the want to be drinking  seawater down the tube but having had a whole new world opened up to me, I am determined  to get the hang of it now..........who knows it could become a new hobby

Having checked out, we had no towels, so we laid on ţhe sand in the Xmas sunshine to dry out, or rather Al laid, I dozed off. Having been out in the Hawaiian sun fairly recently I wasn't at risk of burning but I don't think Alistairs legs or arms have seen the light of day for a while, sunscreen is not really popular in Hawaii if you are swimming because it washes off and upsets the sea life,  clothing is how they protect themselves like the Australians do.

    Finally dried off and some of the sand removed we headed back to town, stopped at Dennys to eat because it was easy and we could sit in the  car park afterwards and hijack their Wifi .

Kona airport is a quaint  collection of sheds and gazebos, no masses crowding with their surfboards like Maui, no business lounge with Japanese toilet like Honolulu, it is pretty much all open to the elements, the seating is on the concrete and stone walls around the planted areas, you  can stand in the waiting area and watch the planes manoevre on the tarmac..... and hear them, a 737 is fairly loud at close range, a blast from the past, Hawaiian airlines fly 727s out of here, it was before I developed my fear of flying that I last flew a 727, Dan Air no less!

Back across the tarmac and  up the ramp to the plane, sophisticated for this airport, Alaska Airlines have a set of steps!

The theory of "flying the 18 hour day" is that you sleep when it is dark and stay awake when it is light to try and get back into some sort of recognisable timezone,  I had forgotten how  noisy it is flying with a cold, every cavity in your head has its own set of squeaks and pops, and the pain in the ears woke me up a couple of times but by and large I got some sleep on the flight.

Mindful of the walk of shame last time I connected in LAX we made the lounge visit a brief one.  With all the flying  I have done I had forgotten that Al had never done a cross country flight. The plane was a new 737 with seatback screens and interactive maps which told you where you were flying over, it even had  "cockpit" view in 3d.

Early everywhere
The tail winds were very strong West to East and all the flights were shorter than usual, nevertheless, I dont think I have ever been in a 737 flying at nearly 700 MPH before!

Boston doesn't even feel that cold for 4C.

Finally after a relaxing flight upstairs on a 747 we were back in Heathrow, it was "see your breath" type cold- Down to earth with a bit of a shock!