: #+ARCOLOGY_FEED: lionsrear/2023/hawaii.xml : #+ARCOLOGY_TOOT_VISIBILITY: unlisted
arrive and decompress
Four Seasons Hualalai
poke lunch, mai tai, beach. whales breaching at sea. cool polypody ferns and big monstera on iNaturalist. driving in traffic seems inevitable here.. bought a 50$ hat.
Worked on The Arcology Project and lounged
wanted to add a feed for this page and auto-post them to Fediverse and realized that takes a deploy of Terra Firma to actualize, went down the rabbit hole and came out 80% of the way to a solution.
dynamic feeds with feediverse script and a json endpoint, more robust than generating feed2toot command lines... idle tired evening still... early bed.
30$ cisco coconut shrimp dinner
farmer's market and +mauna kea stargazing+
eight gift stalls, two farm stalls mostly containing fruits. nice fruits but i was hoping to cook something tasty tomorrow for dinner. weather preventing muana kea trip tonight, so i guess i'll do more arcology dev on the patio
Meditating on tanha.
finished up feediverse integration, gonna meet up with mom soon at the book store and have sushi for dinner.
sushi and sake dinner; one of my biggest burdens of knowledge is knowing that the go-to restaurant sake is 10$/L at the Asian Grocery near home. 15$/300mL here...
kailua-kona and kona brewery tour
as it says -- the tour was fun enough, the beer tastings were nice. since buying the business back from annheiser busch they added a bunch of new local craft beers that are tasty and interesting but you can't get them on the mainland because AB still owns the rights to producing their older stuff on the mainland. interesting juxtaposition/paradox...
went to some shops and a nice/expensive natural grocery store where i got some herbal tea and small gifts to bring home.
meditation class in the evening over zoom. metta practice, and lecture on managing physical pain through mindfulness practice -- not sure where the connection lies but looking forward to metta this week.
quiet day today, no big surprises. evening reading and then going to bed early to drive to volcano village tomorrow for tea farm tour and hopefully kiluea. bit worried that i don't have a rain jacket... didn't pack well.
Tea Hawaii & Co Farm tour & Volcano National Park
we drove the south side of the island and had lunch at Punalu'u Bakery, a nice recommendation from a Fedizen with a decent plate lunch.
the south side of the island reminds me of parts of northeastern Arizona. low scraggly pine and low brush plantsstorm growing in cinder fields and pumice, quiet run-down villages connected with a middle-age two lane highway. the low clouds of a winter squall mirroring summers on the plateau.
and only a few miles later we plunged in to temperate rainforest not so different than Cascadia's but with all the details changed. Tea Hawaii is a 5 acre forest property with roughly two acres of cultivated tea plants spread around their home studio and in to a native tree and fern forest, with plants up to 20 years old and a few different cultivars.
the tour was done by the woman most responsible for the tea farm, and she was careful to guage our interest before starting -- she lit up when i told her about My Tea Plants and i got to ask some questions about their practices, see how they structured their cuttings propagation, and managed their soil and plant health. really insightful and invigorating as i make plans to put my tea plants in the ground and start propagating cuttings this spring.
the tour ended with a cupping session of five of the farm's teas, and i took home a lovely black tea.
we went to Volcano National Park afterward and that was cool but it started pouring rain and my genious ass didn't bring any rain gear and left my sweater at the condo thinking i would rather just be rained on during the tea tour, forgetting that we'd be out after dark. the kiluea caldera was cool but i was a bit miserable.
i really don't like all the driving this place entails. it'd be cool to stay in Hilo and backpack and camp around there, i bet...
drove to Hawi and Pololu lookout
Drove up to the north side of the island and out to Pololu lookout. too wet and muggy to hike the falls. hawi has a nice coffee house and some cute art shops. missed the saturday farmer's market.
tired day, dinner at a decent tourist-y fish spot in Kona called Fish Hopper. listening to Daytona 24 on-and-off.