Day one of Hibiscus week. This one was outside The Poseidon Restaurant in Del Mar.

I’ll be posting more shots of these photogenic flowers over the course of the week…

This is one of many attempts to get the long exposure water effect right on a waterfall. It was taken pretty early on during our trek down the road to Hana (and, yes, it really is about the journey and not the destination).

Although this is perhaps the least impressive of the waterfalls we saw, I think it is the one where the effect worked best. We actually did the trip as a loop, going past the seven sacred pools and back past the Tedeschi Vineyards.

The road for the first hour or so past the seven pools was partially unpaved (by which they mean it alternates between paved stretches and unpaved stretches), but did not cause any problem for the car we were driving.

Walking around the shoreline path at Wailea, between the beaches there are rocky areas like this one where the waves come crashing in.

What first caught my attention, and the reason I climbed down the mud slope to get to the rocks, were the large black crabs that were climbing over them. Unfortunately, it seems that the crabs do not like their photo being taken and scuttled away before I got even close to them.

I think that this shot captures some of the ruggedness of an area more commonly associated with soft sand beaches, luxury hotels and condominiums these days.

Taken in the aquarium on Maui, this not so small crab would stop and pose for photos as he ran sideways along the glass wall of his tank. Must be a puzzling experience for a crab to see a totally alien world so close, and yet not be able to get to it because of something you can’t see.

Some of the columns at Chichén Itzá near (relatively) Cancun, in Mexico. There are meant to be 1000 of them, although we were told that there are actually less than that. Still impressive.

It is believed that they once supported a thatched roof, and that the area was a large marketplace.

One of several seals on a rock just below the road in La Jolla. Most of them seemed to be on this rock, although there were a few swimming around it; perhaps waiting for their chance at the slide up. That seemed to require careful timing so that the wave would help push you up onto the rock high enough that it didn’t just pull you straight back down on its way out again. Several times we saw this fail, the seal making it part way up only to be sucked back down as the wave receded.

This surf board, belonging to the life guards, was the only thing on the beach at La Jolla. It was an overcast afternoon, most people were up on the road level looking at the pelicans along the rocks and the seals swimming around the little bay and climbing up onto the rocks. Not a lot of call for a rescue surf board, but it was ready in case.

At Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando there was a family of gorillas. This one was standing out near the front when we got to the viewing area. Then he got up an moved into the longer grasses; then he got up and moved again to be even further away from the strange apes who were looking at him through the shiny metalic eye pieces.

A starfish in a shallow pool at the aquarium on Maui. One of a number of photos from our trip to Maui last year that I uploaded recently into my Flickr photostream.

Actually the back of the train; this one was heading north from San Diego, and not going slowly through the crossing either. It is odd that the train’s designers spent time making it at least somewhat aerodynamic, and then its operator chooses to drive it backwards!

Oh, and in case you were wondering whether there was an engine on the other end too, look at the photo of the same train approaching.