Liz headed off to do her last class to be scuba certified. Joan went alone to snorkel from the boat and take some video of her diving using our underwater video camera.
Checking out of the Ohana Waikiki West was an inconsistent experience for various members of the party. Dave had to turn in his [...]

Liz was scheduled for a beach dive today which is the next step on the way to her scuba certification. Most of the rest of us headed to Diamond Head to hike to the top. The guidebook we have been using (Frommer’s Honolulu & Oahu Day by Day) said:
The climb up Diamond Head is steep, [...]

Six of us got up and headed to Pearl Harbor to see the USS Arizona memorial. We had been told to get up very early to avoid the long lines but this is not really a group that is early risers. We got through busy monday morning traffic to Pearl Harbor around 8:15am. We had [...]

Liz got up early to dive to start the process of getting her scuba certification while the rest of us headed to Hanauma Bay for our own close encounters with all things aquatic. The bay is a nature preserve in part of an ancient caldera that had eroded until it was flooded by the sea. [...]

My family of four and five friends are heading to Oahu, Hawaii for a week. A friend dropped us off at San Jose airport for a direct flight to Honolulu. We were greeted with the longest security lines that I have seen since 9/11. We had allowed plenty of time and were not checking luggage. [...]

I just got back from dropping Andrew and Friedel Grant from the TravellingTwo.com website back at the train station so that they could head back to San Francisco. If you are not aware of their story, Andrew and Friedel have been biking around the world for two and one half years. On Tuesday they should [...]

Phoenix Mountain Preserve
“You are not afraid of snakes are you?”
Among the questions that I don’t want to hear at the beginning of a hike that question ranks well up there. The irony is that I was being asked that while I was right in the center of the sprawl that is Phoenix Arizona. Phoenix [...]

Filipe, the weaver I met yesterday, picked me up in his car at 10am outside of the hostel. We headed for some of the well known sites in the valley.
The Big Tree
The first stop was at the “big tree” which is in fact a very very big and very old tree. It [...]

The strangest day about day 7 of the trip was that I was still in Oaxaca. My usual travel pace would have put me on the road again after two days in one spot and it would have been simple to turn my back on Oaxaca and head elsewhere. But I had booked this trip [...]

After breakfast and a (hot) shower I went over to the tour place and caught the shuttle to Monte Alban. In the van on the way over I struck up a conversation with a Mexican man who had done a section hike of the southern most section of the Pacific Crest Trail. There had been [...]