Miscellaneous family visit photos (part 3)

I mentioned in the last post in this series that I had a few photos from something I hadn't done before, and that turns out to have been “riding in a helicopter.” The final day my family was here visiting last year, we tried to take a helicopter tour of Kīlauea. Unfortunately, the weather did not comply; it was raining lightly when we took off, but the tour company thought we'd have a chance of making it out ahead of the clouds before we got to the volcano. However, a denser bit of weather rolled in faster than anticipated, and before we'd flown more than five minutes we were informed that it just wasn't meant to be that day and we had to turn back.

An upside is that they didn't charge us for the ten-minute helicopter flight we took, which was still a pretty neat experience. Riding in it felt exactly like how I'd imagined my drone must feel while flying, and while none of the photos I got during the trip were particularly great (due to the rain), I did snap a few of the area around the Hilo airport that I thought were interesting enough to share.

A shot looking over towards the UH Hilo campus (and Gemini facility), over the mall on the left.

View of the second runway at Hilo airport looking out over the bay.

Like I said, they're not the best shots, but it was really cool getting to see the ground from a height above where I can fly a drone and I always enjoy such opportunities. And with that failed outing, perhaps we'll have to try again in the future sometime. While I hate flying for long durations (on crowded airplanes, with no leg room…), I actually quite enjoy flying in short bursts.

Anyway, with this post series winding down, I've got some more post topics coming up due to the fact (which I can finally announce) that I spent two weeks over the end of January and beginning of February in Jordan, digging at an archaeological excavation and going on a few tours as well. Preparing for that trip was eating up a lot of my focus and energy in January, so now that it's over and I'm recovering from jetlag I can hopefully get some more posts out before too long. So keep an eye out! A hui hou!