After taking it pretty easy on our travel day, we decided to make our first full day in Hawaii an adventure day to head into one of Hawaii's two national parks, Haleakala. If you're not familiar, this is the national park on top of the mountain with the telescopes, not the park with the lava. The thing I find so fascinating about this mountain is that we started out roughly around zero feet elevation and drove to the top of this mountain at over 10,000 feet, that's insane.
We left pretty early in the morning as we didn't know how busy it was going to be. The further we went, the more and more the scenery changed. I'd never been to this type of tropical elevation before, so this was a unique experience. It felt so familiar to what I've seen before, but upon close inspection, there was a world of difference in the plant life. Another note about elevation, it's a good idea to bring a jacket when you're heading up to 10K feet, it doesn't matter where you are, 10K is cold.
Unfortunately, there was a pretty thick cloud cover when we got to the top. There had been some massive rain storms and flooded in the week's pas, and I think the storm system hadn't entirely made its way out yet. Regardless, the landscape before us was stunning. We hiked around and explored what we could, but its a bit limiting on what you can do on top. The park makes it was all the way down to the ocean on the south side, but we planned to explore that area another day.
When we got back down to our place, we decided it was about time to get our feet wet and go for a swim. I recently bought a waterproof enclosure for my M6 that I was super excited and nervous to use. We decided to have our first swim right off turtle beach rather than hiking to the sandier beach down the way. We got down to the water and my stomach was in my throat, I was about to have an excellent time taking underwater pictures or was about to dunk an expensive camera in the water, but it worked, and I was in for some good fun!
