This year Scott had his North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society meeting in Kona, Hawaii. He presented a poster titled Neuro-Ophthalmologic Manifestations of a Hemizygous Patient with Autosomal Recessive Spastic Ataxia of Charlevoix-Saguenay. It was a good meeting, but I won't dwell on the details of that.
We arrived on the Big Island late on Saturday night, after a full day of travel.
On Sunday, we got up to go to church. Their meeting was different from our meetings in just one regard. Everyone who speaks at the pulpit first says, "Brother and Sisters, Aloha!" and everyone in the congregation responds with an Aloha.
We made it back to the conference and Scott caught the rest of the meeting and Jen had a big nap.
Monday was another big day of conference meetings.
We met up with the other former Iowa fellows for dinner.
On Tuesday we had some time to hit the beach and the lagoon for some snorkeling.
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| This was a mixed black and white sand beach. |
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| We ate a picnic on the beach before wading in. |
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| Snorkels! |
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| Plenty of tropical fish to find in the lagoon. |
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| One of the highlights of the whole trip was swimming with this guy! |
We even had time to catch the sunset.
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| Just as the sun goes down, a runner comes by and lights all the Tiki Torches and when he reaches the end, blows a signal on a large conch. |
On Wednesday we had some time in the afternoon to visit a Hawaiian sacred place, a place of refuge, Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau.
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| My Tiki face. |
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| Hawaiian native game similar to checkers. Konane. By the way, we learned that the Hawaiian alphabet only contains 13 letters, which really creates a certain recognizable sound. |
While we were at the place of refuge, we found a beautiful trail for a walk.
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| We came across this herd of goats while we were meandering. |
While we were in the area, we made a trip to the LDS Kona, Hawaii temple, too.
On Thursday the conference came to a conclusion and we zipped out to the other side of the island for some lava action.
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| The lava field is somewhat remote. We rented bikes to get as close as we could on this gravel road. We chose these pedal assist E-bikes. It was a blast cruising down the road on these things. |
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| After we took the bikes as far as we could, we continued on on foot across the lava fields. This was quite a hike, over uneven terrain. |
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| After 90 minutes of hiking we made it to the active lava flow. Very hot, glowing molten rock! |
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| Coming back, it started to get dark and we realized we were hiking over molten lava down in the cracks. |
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| No wonder it was so hot. |
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| We came back in the dark. These headlamps were invaluable. |
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| On the way back there is just a faint, dim light way off in the distance to guide the way. It sort of comes and goes depending on the lay of the land, but keep following those little glimmers that you get. As you get closer the light gets stronger. |
On Friday we toured Akaka falls and Botanical gardens and a vanilla bean farm
Before we went back to the airport, we made one more stop to look at petroglyphs.
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| It was amazing how many different climates there are on one relatively small island. |
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| One last visit to the beach |
