Our week in San Fran just flew by. It started with Burger Night on Friday when we got in- what a treat it was to have a family dinner with all three of us home at once and such an array of toppings for our burgers. Yum!
We headed to Sausalito on Saturday and took the ferry across to San Fran city. It's always nice to get out on the water, and we had a fun day walking and people watching. The line for the ferry was very slow moving, but we were lucky enough to have a man and his dog entertain us with their singing and guitar playing.
Sunday we met up with S & K, who live in Haight. It was a windy day, and we had to learn to walk quickly to keep up with them!
Monday we went to a Giants game. It was P's first time in the stadium- I love the view from there.
We spent the rest of the week hanging out with mom and family- it was good to be home for a bit. We went to Santa Cruz, Berkeley Bowl, bowling, and we even saw Jerry Rice on the golf course.
So it has been suggested that New Zealand needs a new flag. The NZ government is currently taking submissions for flag designs, so if you'd like to make your mark in New Zealand history, now is your chance. Submit your designs! It's a bit of a debate and the topic of many jokes at the moment as to whether it's worth all the money being spent on this re-design. They've been holding meetings that aren't very well attended, but apparently all the engagement and support is coming in online. There are over 7,000 submissions for a new design so far. Many are variations on the silver fern, kiwi bird, and korus in red, white and blue. A few incorporate rugby, and then there are those that have a unique take on what it means to be a kiwi, for example displaying the kiwi fruit instead of the kiwi bird. Here are just a few that I found funny, unique, or interesting. Have a browse yourself and see if there's anything you like better than the current New Zealand flag design. If you click on the title of the design it should take you to the submissions website where you can read the reasoning behind the submission from the designer.
It's not every day you have the opportunity to stand atop the crater of an active volcano and look down into a sea of spurting lava. I'm really glad we took advantage of this amazing (albeit expensive) opportunity - it was even better than I had imagined.
We were lucky enough to only have four in our tour group. From reading reviews, it seems like you normally caravan to the foot of the crater with lots of other groups, but we were lucky enough to only see one other small group (3 people only) when we arrived. Getting there though was an expedition indeed.
I've spent the past couple days compiling a video of photos and footage from the journey, so I won't say too much and will let the video speak for itself. I just want to point out a few things that are hard to capture in a five minute video:
* Our home for the week- we could see our place on Efate from the plane as we flew off to Tanna, see if you can figure out which one it is in the video!
* The cyclone's destruction- note the high number of trees that have fallen during Cyclone Pam. You can see this from the ground but I remember it being remarkably noticeable from the air, even more so on Tanna than Efate.
* It's bumpy- while making this video and when uploading it, I was asked multiple times if I wanted to stabilize the footage. I didn't think it was nearly as bad as I remember the journey itself being, so chose not to employ the stabilization. Hopefully it doesn't make you sick (I managed to avoid the car-sickness, only just).
* The smell- of course, being on top of an active volcano smells strongly of sulfur and whatever other mysterious things are erupting from the center of the earth.
* The heat- when I showed photos to my coworkers, they all asked if we could feel the heat. I must say, it wasn't noticeably hot whilst we were standing on the crater edge- in fact one of the guides was shivering. However, once we started climbing back down toward the car you could feel the air getting cooler and realized that you were just standing on top of a massive fire ball.
* The sound- the video captures some of it, but at times I thought the earth was going to open up to a big dinosaur and swallow us whole (lucky it didn't!).
Diving was my main inspiration for visiting Vanuatu, but places with good diving often come with good snorkeling and Vanuatu was no exception. It even has this wonderful tourist gimmick of an underwater post office! Of course, being the fish that I am, we just had to check it out.
Unfortunately, the manned underwater post office had been swept away by the March 13, 2015 cyclone. Luckily, the actually post office box still remained and is supposedly checked daily. Mom, let me know if you ever get your postcard- I actually wrote it underwater! How cool is that?
Apparently the coral here was much better before the cyclone, but it was a pretty good start to our vacation if you ask me.
I'm only going to apologize once for the large number of underwater photos that are to follow on this blog (this post and those to follow)- I got a new GoPro toy and have lots of photos to show off. Here are a few from the first day:
There's so much to see and do!
We headed to Sausalito on Saturday and took the ferry across to San Fran city. It's always nice to get out on the water, and we had a fun day walking and people watching. The line for the ferry was very slow moving, but we were lucky enough to have a man and his dog entertain us with their singing and guitar playing.
Sunday we met up with S & K, who live in Haight. It was a windy day, and we had to learn to walk quickly to keep up with them! 
