Someone kept yelling “Johnny!” in the distance. Then, as the yell got louder and I looked up, I was shocked to see who was standing before me. “Oh, what?!?” I said in disbelief…

It didn’t take long before the “trail” revealed the climb that was before us. “Oh my god,” said Julie incredulously. “We have to climb that?!?”

The taxi driver left us and so here we were at the start of our trip in the outskirts of a town unfamiliar to us with our luggage, no rental car, a foul mood, and our trip in serious jeopardy…

It wasn’t long after when the small plane’s engine sputtered and then stopped. The plane then started to descend. Everyone in the plane except the pilot looked around wondering if this was it…

Screams were heard all around us as if we were in some rollercoaster ride. The Kiwi guy sitting behind me kept yelling to no one in particular, “To the extreme!”

Julie and I thought he wanted to talk to us because he might have been the parking enforcement guy. After some futile attempts at communication beyond a sentence or two, I eventually asked…

I was determined to try to see the falls past the short narrow slot canyon with boulders wedged above. So I took off my socks, wore my chacos, and started wading…

By this time, passengers from both buses were watching like paying spectators. Our driver tried to help the other driver, who was a strikingly-dressed Madonna-lookalike female driver…

…we went inside and checked out the displays. A guy eventually came out to us and guilted us into paying for museum admission, which we weren’t aware of until I noticed a sign…

In one stretch of road at Mývatn, we heard things hitting the windshield as if there was a gravel rain or something. It turned out that we had driven through a cloud of midges!

The receptionist was named Claus and he was an interesting guy in that he was German and it seemed that he was in the middle of learning Icelandic. Claus sensed that I was also…

…we walked around the center of town aimlessly looking for places to eat for dinner. We had to look long and hard because we struggled with sticker shock as every place offering…

I felt strange carrying around a tripod and DSLR camera in hiking clothes in the urban jungle, but my mind left this awkwardness when we saw the impressive…

As the boat pulled away from the American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls, I suddenly felt something warm hit me in the face. It didn’t take long to figure out what had just happened…

The pounding waves to the left were always threatening to pluck me from the coastal rocks and out into sea. And at the same time, the rugged cliffs that produced these coastal rocks also…

So we were faced with the decision of whether to do the difficult trek right up to the lava flow or returning to the car wondering what if. It was now 5:30pm and the daylight was fading fast…

The relentless climb up the trail seemed like it was never ending. I was starting to get worried that I might not find the waterfall as it had started to reach the two-hour point…

Trying to kill time for the next flight I saw a picture book about the Big Island, which was the last major Hawaiian Island we had yet to visit. While I was busy flipping through the pages…

This time however, the submerged rocks weren’t visible. I thought this was kind of strange and it immediately became apparent to me that the wide stream had risen…

Having been to the ‘Ohe’o Gulch (or the so-called Seven Sacred Pools) nearly four years ago, it was strange seeing the churning, brownish raging whitewater…