No Parking!

Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii, USA

Driving downtown at rush hour on a weekday: Isn’t it an uplifting challenge? (Rhetorical question.) It is relatively easy to despise cities when you are looking for a parking place and the streets are crowded. This week I have had to make a couple of forays into the asphalt wasteland on a workday, navigating the sometimes baffling morass of one-way streets and time-limited (but still very much metered) parking places. One can’t park after 3:00 on streets commuters use to leave in evening and, of course, my meetings always seem to run from 2:30 until 5 o’clock. Finally having captured “my” parking spot each day, I simmered over the hot summer city blocks to my meeting. The “no parking” signs reminded me of this picture.

At least here in Volcanoes national park there is a good reason for not parking. The sign in this shot is genuine, but the road has been covered by lava from nearby Kilauea volcano (which at this writing has been oozing lava for a little over 29 years). It amazes me that the lava took all evidence of structures but left some of the street signs. Apparently, the lava cooled fast enough that the metal signposts survived, leaving a few street signs above the flow where the tourists wander every day. (The parking here is a few hundred yards away, along the sides of this same road before it reaches the lava flow.)

A working day in the city; I’d rather be in Hawaii.

(Sony Cybershot DSC-F707, integrated lens at 9.7mm, ISO 100, f/2.8, 1/250 sec. shutter)
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 16:22 PM. It is filed under Land & Air, thePhotoTourist and tagged with Big Island, clouds, flow, Hawaii, lava, lava flow, no parking, not_uw, street, street sign, surface, volcano, Volcanoes National Park. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.