Once again, we chose to camp at the beach for our Christmas holiday. This time, we went to Whittington Beach Park, which was over a three hour drive for us. We took Timmy the Titan so we could sleep in the tent-on-top camper. We went to bed early, and at one point I woke up, still mostly asleep, and looked at the sky. I wasn’t really awake, but it looked as though the sun was rising. I have a pretty good internal clock, and I was certain it was not yet midnight. I was confused, and thought that perhaps there was a forest fire or that the aliens driving comet 3I/ATLAS had finally decided to begin their conquest of planet Earth.
Still bleary, it eventually occurred to me that we had driven fairly close to Kīlauea. I checked the local news and, sure enough, the latest episode of 1,000+ foot lava fountaining had begun. It only lasted a few hours, and I never woke up enough to think to take a picture or wake HA up, but the National Park Service photo above (from last year) captures the scene pretty well.
I don’t suppose I will ever again be satisfied with regular old electric Christmas lights.
—2p
addendum 2025-12-26T17:36-10:00
We did a lot of driving around looking at property over the holiday. Our volcano has been dormant for a few thousand years, but Kīlauea has been active. It was eerie to drive around quiet neighborhoods and suddenly have a residential street end abruptly in a wall of lava from the 2018 eruption. A reminder that Tūtū Pele still wields awesome power that we puny humans are powerless to stop.