Yesterday we crossed the equator and went from being a pollywog to a shellback. More about that later.

We stayed in Maui for two days. On our second day, we took a trip to the Haleakala Crater, the world’s largest dormant volcano.

It was approximately a 20 mile trip that took over and hour and a half. We saw many houses that had banana and papaya trees in their front yard.

As we are going up the side of the crate the view is magnificent. Here you can see the tree and clouds as look toward the harbor.

Eventually, we reach the boundary of the national park.

Remember the picture as we looked up at the clouds? Now you can see that we have climbed over 7,000 feet so far and are now looking on top of the clouds as they are below us.

As we get to the end of the road, we are at over 9,740 feet. At this elevation, there is 20% less oxygen. I can tell you that it was true as I could feel my lungs grasping for air. Having my “Alaskan” cold hanging on didn’t help my breathing.

The landscape is nothing more than volcanic rock with a variety of shrubbery.

One of the shrubs was the rare silver-sword plant, which had just bloomed the week before.

One of the observatories on top of the volcano is a NORAD station. I’ll probably get in trouble taking this picture. J

As we look over the crater rim, it looks like a lunar landscape. Actually, the crater is 2.5 miles wide and 7.5 miles long and 3,000 feet deep. It is hard to grasp the magnitude of the crater from these pictures.

We were not there at sunrise, but we were told the sunrise is absolutely beautiful. The best we could do was snap a picture of a poster of a sunrise over the crater.

We got our tour guide to take a picture of Rexie and Rexcat overlooking the crater. Can you believe she got that close to the edge?

Here we are looking at the summit. You can walk up there, but I was breathing too hard to even try.

As we leave the crater rim, I was able to get a picture of one of the switchbacks. There were no guard rails anywhere, but occasionally a few volcanic rocks on the edge. Like they would stop the bus. Sure!

We find paragliders waiting for the cloud to move so they can soar with the eagles.

Here we are getting to go into the cloud and finally have the clouds back where they belong, above us.

 What a day. It was simply amazing.