What a blast! This was really the coolest tour that I have given so far, and by far! A fun crowd, mixed weather with long streaks of sunshine followed by some misty weather and then beautiful patches of sun mixed with shadows for the final show of Pele at Waldron Ledge Overlook.
We started off quite badly, actually, as I got four cancellations by email – but as you don’t need to “sign up” for any of these ranger guided activities and hikes anyway, this was just a courteous message to let me know the four Swiss wouldn’t make it, so my expectation was to be left with 15 Austrian Girls. That this obviously had been a joke by the local driver of the tour that I had met two days earlier at “After Dark in the Park” was discovered only this morning when I met a mixed group of young Austrians that had been to a Robotics Convention in Honolulu and made a full holiday out of it. In addition to them, who had sort of “asked” for a German tour, I had a Swiss family that I had talked to one day earlier and apparently decided to go on this hike despite meeting me before 😉 and two spontaneous hikers from Lucerne who had heard the Ranger guided hike announcement – the National Park Service cannot do “private” tours and therefore all hikes are public and announced.
With a group of >20 hikers I think I was really at the max that this particular (Halema’uma’u) Trail could handle in its narrowest sections and places where I wanted to hold stops. So, a large caterpillar of hikers set off shortly after 11 o’clock to go through my previously posted program here, plus a lot of spontaneous questions and discussions that came up and that were very good.
We took a bit longer than expected with all the questions and the fun the audience had especially down on the Caldera floor – we took photos at the edge of the return trail up to Kilauea Iki and finally at Waldron’s Ledge and we did not arrive back at the KVC before 1.45 to discover that one of the rental cars of the Robotics professor had a flat tire. It was decided that this should wait after lunch, as the car jack seemed to be too short to get the car fully up and the tire out, so I wanted to help out with a government vehicle to the restaurant in Volcano down 1 mile on the road. Well, you are “not allowed to take civilians in a government vehicle”, so my boss gave me the key to his private car which we needed to clean out first – so we arrived at Kilauea Lodge after 2 pm to discover they closed just then and their reservation was void.
Everything was finally resolved with no further problems – Lava Rock Café was more than happy to host the crowd to sell a few “Loco Moco” dishes and I found two pieces of solid timber to help the car jack a little further up and we changed the tire in no time to get them back to Kona. What a full day!
