Visitors and a Tsunami

The weekend after I came back from the mainland, I had a couple of friends come to visit me.  My friend Kate was room-mates with me back during freshman year in college.  She got married later that year, but we've kept in contact ever since then.  She lives in California now, meaning we haven't seen each other for a couple of years.  Needless to say, I was pretty excited when she told me she was buying tickets to Maui!

She flew into Maui on Thursday night, and a friend of hers flew in with her.  Unfortunately I still had work on Friday, so they managed to entertain themselves for the day.

That weekend I got to play tour guide, and I'm pretty sure we packed about a month's worth of activities into about four days!  Here's a brief glimpse into our reunion weekend.
Saturday we spent the morning at the swap meet, then we took the trip around the island to Hana.  This will be my third trip around, and we stopped at a lot of the same places I'd been to before.

If you look closely, this sign warns us to stay back on account of the blowhole.  Clearly we had no qualms getting close to this sign!

Here is the aforementioned blowhole.  Oh yeah, and some kids that were perhaps a tad too close!

I saw this little graveyard.  I thought it looked kinda peaceful with the sunlight streaming through and hitting the surfboard...

Here's Kate looking rather pensive while enjoying the black sand beach,

I've been to these little lava tube freshwater pools before, and it proved just as difficult to get a picture as before.  What you can't see is that there is a cave filled with water, and this cave branches off to both the left and the right.  On my last visit here I had explored the extent of the cave, even though it is quite literally pitch black.  I was attempting to play tour guide, and coax my rather reluctant friends to swim to the back of the left lava tube.  However, as I started swimming I got a whiff of some rather potent smoke which was hovering over the top of the water.  Yes, my friends, someone was hiding in the back of the lava tube smoking pot.  The best part of the story was that despite us complaining and yelling, they didn't make a sound, (as if their smoke, and the abandoned pair of slippers at the top didn't give them away).  Well we decided to leave them to their own devices, and we got a good laugh out of it.

We made it around to Hana, then we headed back the way we came.  Too bad it got dark before we actually made it back.  That road is incredibly twisty so one of my passengers started getting carsick; it's a narrow, pitch black road through the jungle.  The drive back was a bit eerie.  It was even more eerie when about an hour after getting home I started getting all these text messages about a tsunami warning.
So... I'm from the mainland.  I don't know anything about tsunamis.  I kinda freaked out because the Kahului harbor, which is basically across the street from my apartment, historically gets hit the worst.  They were evacuating everyone in the "danger zone," and we were smack in the middle of that zone!  After making some calls, a good friend of mine offered her place for me and my two friends.  We ended up huddling around the TV watching everyone being evacuated on the news.  Apparently there was a rather large earthquake in Vancouver that sent waves toward the Hawaiian islands.  According to the experts, it's usually the 3rd or 4th wave that is the most destructive, and they come at 20 minute intervals.  That meant is was quite late into the night before they decided it wasn't as bad as initially predicted, and it was early the next morning when we were given the all clear.

After being evacuated for one, I started noticing evidence of past tsunami's all around the island.  These signs were posted all over the Big Island, but more on that later!

Anyway, after getting a nice little scare, and making my two guests sleep at a stranger's house, we were able to go back to my apartment.  Apparently we had gotten the worst of it in Maui, and despite reports of a 4 foot wave, there was no damage.

It was quite the adventure, and we were amused to find this being sold in the stores by the next day.  Yeah... I didn't buy one.