Stephen Colbert declares war on the Marshall Islands

I record the Colbert Report ever night, because, let's face it, I can't stay up that late to watch it.

Last Tuesday (or maybe it was Wednesday), Stephen talked about something that nobody ever mentions ... the Marshall Islands!

Unfortunately, the giant rig that's spilling all the oil is registered to the Marshall Islands.

June 16 at 3:52PM
Stephen Colbert Declares War on The Marshall Islands (Which Apparently Is a Place Supposedly)
POSTED BY: Dennis DiClaudio
Fun fact: The Republic of the Marshall Islands is not where the Matthew McConaughey movie We Are Marshall takes place, but it is the place with the highest rate of leprosy in the entire world. Lots of people don't get those things confused.

Click here for hilarious video.

Day trip to Ebeye

Random photos time:



1. Me snorkeling (woo-hoo!)



2. The 1 photo I took during our visit to Ebeye (not to be confused with "Ebay").



Ebeye is where the majority of the Marshallese people live. It's the most heavily populated place on earth (people per square mile). Even more crowded that the 'classic' India or China that most people think of. It's pretty much a dump. Although, there was this pretty little cove thing with cute boats that I took a photo of.

Kwajalein: Reef Walking

Like I said earlier (you were reading and comprehending my posts right???), all the Marshall Islands are made of coral, and connected underwater by coral.



Well, the island nearest to Kwaj is pretty close. It's only about 3 or 4 hundred yards away. When the tide is lowest you can easily walk in ankle deep water over to the uninhabited island.



So we tried to walk over there, but the tide wasn't super duper low, and the water was kind-of choppy. I guess when it's not choppy you can see starfish and other sea life. So we walked around on the shallow coral reef for a while, I burned the backs of my legs (sun reflecting off the ocean), and took some photos.

Kwajalein: Airport

Here is another You Tube video I made from my trip to Kwajalein.

I turned into a 5 year old boy on this vacation - every time I had the opportunity to watch an airplane take off or land, I was there!

Since the island is so tiny, you could clearly hear the plane land, so it was easy to ride the .5 miles to the airport and watch them take off.

One day, while looking for shells, an Army supply plane just appeared on top of our heads.  It was loud and AWESOME!  So the next day, I found out what time the Continental plan was going to arrive, waited on the beach, and got a video of the plane almost landing on my head.  Awesome!

Check out the Continental plane in the 2nd part of the You Tube video.  The plane's wheels touch down, jump up and then touch down again.  Freaky!

Kwaj - riding bikes

Here are some random photos of my mom, dad and Jonathan riding the ghetto bikes around Kwaj (Kwaj rhymes with "Dodge"). It's hard to tell from the photos, but all the bikes are 80% rust. I guess the ocean air tears them apart.



We went on a quick island tour our first day. With in 15 minutes, my shoulders were getting pretty red and fried-like! Ouch!

Almost there ...

Day 3 (and day 4 b/c of the time change) of traveling.


We left Hawaii around 7am (which sounds early, but since we were kind-of still on Eastern Time Zone, we were up at 4:30am).



The Continental flight (which is a full size plane) flys from Honolulu to Majuro (the capital of the Marshall Islands), Kwajalein, Truck, Ponepei, some other island, then finally gets to Guam. Can you image flying to Guam? You have a 45 minute stop at 5 other islands!!!!! Although, the stop at Ponepei was cancelled, b/c a week ago a plane didn't take off properly and ended up 1/2 on the runway and 1/2 in the ocean. I guess after a week, it still hadn't been moved yet.



Jonathan made me laugh when he said, "oh, we stop at Majuro first? I can get something to eat!" Like there is a Starbucks or McDonalds. I was like, "ummmm ... it doesn't really work that way." How it does work is you get off the plane by walking down some stairs onto the runway, walk into a non-air conditioned holding room, and wait.



Finally, at 11:30am (the "next" day) we arrived at Kwajalein. Here are 2 arial photos. Notice the U shape, and the runway. You can also see about 8-10 other mini islands up near the top. All the Marshall Islands are made of coral, and they are all connected underwater by more coral.

Kwajalein: Panoramic Photos

A You Tube video of Panoramic photos from my groovy digital camera (it allows me to take 3 photos, then stitches them together).



Enjoy photos of:
Emon Beach (main beach - faces the lagoon, therefore no big waves)
Boat Dock (where the sharks live)
Military Family Housing (my parents live on the one to the right)
Pacific Ocean (where the winds and the waves live)


I have some other You Tube videos (not from this trip). If you go to http://www.youtube.com/ and search for "ahowald308", you will find them all.

Friday, May 30th

Today is Friday, May 30. We fly out of Kwajalein at 6pm and land in Hawaii at around 2pm.

I've only flown 1 red eye before in my life (the last time I left here) and it was sooooooooooooo cold on the plane! I remember not sleeping much at all b/c I was shivering. This time I'm prepared. I packed gloves, a scarf and a stocking hat! Nothing can stop me from sleeping!

Last Day

Today was our last full day. However, we don't leave until 6pm-ish tomorrow, so that's a pretty full day too.

In the morning we did the usual. Watch SportsCenter - which is pretty cool b/c most of the games are already over b/c of the crazy time change. We played a bunch of Rummikube games. Winner always gets to eat a muffin or ice cream or something. Unfortunatly I'm darn good at this game, so I'm getting a little puffy.

My mom and I hit "Macy's" for the third and final time. I found some muffin paper things (with July 4th symbols on them). A pack of 50 was a whopping 17 cents. I bought 5. And you know those cotton cheerleader style shorts? Normally they say "hot" or "juicy" on the butt? They had a bunch of those for 87 cents, thankfully with out any tacky sayings on the butt. I bought 6 pairs of those.

Around 3pm my mom and I went snorkeling one last time while the boys read books on the beach. My dad can't swim (which is pretty funny b/c he lives on an island) and Jonathan doesn't like snorkeling very much. I found a sweet and BIG pointy shell on the ocean floor. My mom dove down and picked it up, but there was something living inside of it. I found 6 huge shells while snorkeling, but they were all alive. All the cool shells I find, either snorkeling or on the beach, are always alive.

We have been washing and air drying all our shells and beach glass on a huge towel. My dad said one night he was reading outside, and one of my shells was walking away. He said he was too tired to go stop it, so it just walked out of the porch. Thanks for nothing dad!

3, 2, 1, Liftoff!

As this vacation comes to a close, the blogging gets more and more boring.

Today we did a whole pile of jack squat. We took a walk in the morning to see the high school. Each year the senior class (I think there were 12-15 kids this year) all paints their name on the road by the high school. Each kid paints it to represent themselves. Like "Brittani" painted her name along with a bunch of flowers and "Jon" painted his name using the colors of the Marshallese flag, etc ...

I've been dying to bike down to the runaway and watch a big Continental plane almost land on my head. It's a PAIN IN THE BUTT to bike down to the runway, b/c the winds off the Pacific Ocean are a killer. But I dragged myself down there, and after about 20 minutes of waiting (and finding sea shells and sea glass) the plane almost landed on my head. I took a 30 second video of it. I have a ton of short videos to YouTube once I get home.

Tonight is movie night at the ARC (Adult Rec Center). Tonight's movie is Jumper. It looked kind-of lame when I saw previews 4 months ago, but it's something to do. AFN (Armed Forces Network) is getting more and more painful by the day!

Only 1.5 days left!

Happy Memorial Day X2

It's only 3pm here, but I'm at the computer lab. Even though today is Tuesday, it's Monday back in the US - so we're officially celebrating Memorial Day today (then why was the beach party yesterday?). I guess the Kwaj residents do that for every holiday. Even their weekend is Sunday/Monday b/c that corresponds to the USA Saturday/Sunday.

I wanted to ride my bike down to the runway to watch the big Continental plane fly in and almost land on my head (like that Army plane did yesterday) and take a video of it. I was about 5 minutes too late. I was almost at the beach when I saw the plane lights. I was so bummed! It's really, REALLY hard work to ride bikes by the runway. There is a killer wind. The plane will land around 5pm tomorrow night, so maybe I'll try it again.

As we got back off the runway, it was noon. They were about to do a 21 gun salute to Memorial Day. I got that on film. Although the first time the guns fired I jumped a little bit. Those suckers are loud!

After missing the plane we ride over to see the sharks again. The stupid turtle was still there.

I didn't sleep very well yesterday. Yesterday was also the only day I didn't eat any ice cream. I figured the 2 were related, and I've been pigging out on ice cream today. You can't be too careful!

Not much planned for the rest of the day! The Rays (baseball team) are on at 7pm, so it will probably be a lazy night of baseball watching and probably more ice cream eating. Have you ever tried vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup and peanuts? The salty peanut combined with the sweet ice cream is fantastic!!!

Happy Memorial Day!

Since I'm a day ahead of the US, I get to say "Happy Memorial Day" first! Na-na-na-na.

During low tide (and the hotest part of the day) we biked down near the airport's runway to "glass beach". Everybody found some pretty sweet cowries, except me. Nuts! I did find some old ceramic tiles (from the war?). I also found some nice beach glass. Jonathan was happy I found a Poweraid bottle top with some Coke reward points on it.

While we were on the beach (which was more rocks than beach) my dad yells, "look up!" A small army supply plane was flying in getting ready to land. It literally looked like it was going to crash right on top of us. We were standing about 50 yards from the runway. I couldn't get my camera out of my bag fast enough to take a video of it. It was a small plane, so it wasn't very loud and scary, but it was super cool!

From 2-5pm we hit the main beach. There was a Memorial Day beach party. They had a giant slip 'n slide and somebody was selling Shave Ice (yum!). Yes, I spelled that correctly - it's "Shave Ice" (not ShavED Ice, which seems to make more sense gramatically). We discovered Shave Ice on the Travel Channel. I guess it's super famous in Hawaii. We bought some in Hawaii and it was DELICIOUS!!! I'm not sure why it's 100X better than a regular snowcone, but it is. I was excited to get my hands on some more.

We rode our bikes down to the boat dock and watched some more sharks. My mom counted 26. A very stupid turtle (large ocean turtle - Jonathan calls him Crush - although he's only about 4' across) is always swimming with all the sharks, every day. Sometimes the sharks (who I don't think can see very well) run into the turtle, and scare him a little bit, but he always recomposes himself and swims back in to the pack of sharks. What a stupid turtle.

Only 3.5 more days left. We don't really have much planned for the rest of the time.

Island Hopping

Sticking to our schedule of doing stuff, laying around, doing stuff, lying around ... today was the day to 'do stuff'.

My dad, Jonathan and took a teeny tiny plane to a neighboring Army island called Roi-Namur (pronounced Roy Na-More). Actually Roi is an island and Namur is an island. They were really close together, so the Army just filled in the land between, and now it's 1 island.

Lots of WWII battles between the US and Japan were fought all over the Marshall Islands. They still find live torpedos, ammo shells and even human remains on the islands. A lot of old bunkers and other Japanese war buildings are still standing on Roi-Namur. In fact, there are even some rusted old guns still on the beach. We rented a golf cart and road all over the island (it's not very big, maybe 2 miles long?) looking at all the old WWII buildings.

We got back to Kwaj around 5:30pm, just in time for the feeding frenzy! On weekends, all the fishing boats are due back to harbor at 6pm. The nurse sharks all seem to be able to tell time, and they gather near the dock for a scruptious dinner of fish guts! Luckily, one guy was cleaning a giant fish (about 4' long) and we saw him throw some fish guts to the sharks. I got a sweet video of them all swimming around. It's pretty creepy.

And I'm supposed to want to go snorkeling after I see that?!?

Everything must go!

Today was a lazy day. In fact, this entire vacation has gone like this: lazy, do something, lazy, do something ... since we boated out to Bigej yesterday, today was a scheduled lazy day.

There are 2 stores on this island. Ironically, they are called Macy's and Macy's West. On the other nearby Army island they have 1 store, called Gimbles. Weird huh?

Well, Macy's and Macy's West are going out of business. Everything is 80-95% off! I bought tons of stuff all for only about $15. Jackpot!!! Most of it is cookwear, cheesy t-shirts, candles and tupperware. I wish I needed a Halloween costume - they had tons of ugly clothes for $1 and lots of halloween make up and props.

The rest of the day we played Rummikube (greatest game ever) and watched baseball (it's fun to watch "live" baseball, b/c all the games are over by 4pm.

Tonight is movie night. In 1 hour Over Her Dead Body is on (which sounds really lame) and at 9:30pm is Untraceable. I really want to see Untraceable, but it starts at 9:30pm. I haven't seen 9:30pm since I've been here. Why does the hot air and ocean mist make me so tired? We'll see if I can stay awake that long. Zzzzzz ...

It was bound to happen ...

We had a fun day this morning, which involved a boat ride to an uninhabited island ... and now I'm totally boat/motion sick. I just threw up 5 minutes ago, so now I feel fine, so I better hurry up and type before another wave rolls over. (TMI - I know!)

Back to the boat ... my dad rented a boat from the marina and we boated over to Bigej (pronounced Bee-Gee, like the '70's band). Since it's uninhabited, there is no boat dock, so we had to anchor about 100 yards off shore and swim. We snorkeled around first. Since these islands are all made of coral, the snorkeling is amazing! There are just mounds and mounds of coral, and very colorful fish swimming in and out of them.

Swimming ashore was much harder than it sounds, b/c of all the coral. There was no sand, just coral everywhere. Since I don't really know much about coral, all I know are the rumors - doesn't it cut you if you touch it? Well, the waves bounced me off 2 huge coral heads, and I'm still ok. Jonathan's right leg did take a minor beating though - poor guy. Once onshore we walked 1/2 way around the island looking for shells. We didn't find anything too exciting, but I did get a couple sweet shells to add to my collection. The jackpot find is always a cowrie (I think I spelled that right). Google it to see a photo - or I'll be able to post photos when I get home.

We ran into a gang of Marshalese kids (who said they lived on another island). The kids were about 9 or 10. The Marshallese are all really friendly, and a little curious, but these kids kind-of freaked me out. There were about 7 of them, all unattended, and 2 of them had machetties! (sp?) Kind-of scary, since we were out in the middle of nowhere. I smell a horror movie - The Slaughter of Bigej! The freaky kids actually found me a sweet brown cowrie shell (brown ones are rare), so thank you kids!

After fighting with the coral to snorkle back to the boat, we zoomed home. And now I'm totally sick. But it was all worth it!

Ouch!

It was inevitable (sp?), but I'm sunburned already.

Actually, the first day we flew in (2 days ago), we took a quick bike ride around the island for literally 20 minutes, and my shoulders fried.

Now the backs of my knees are burned. Seriously - the BACKS of my knees?!?

The Marshall Islands (well, this section anyway) is made up of coral. I guess the coral grew tall to form islands, but all the island are connected (underwater) by more coral (that didn't grow as tall). So during low tide you can literally walk from island to island (although some are really far away). There is a small, uninhabited island that is pretty close to Kwajalein that we were going walk to today during low tide (noon), but it was pretty windy, so you couldn't really see the ground very well.

So instead we went snorkeling. Snorkeling here kind-of freaks me out, b/c you are literally in the open ocean. There could be sharks!!! My mom scuba dives and sees them all the time. She claims they won't hurt you, but I would probably pee my pants if I ever saw on while I was snorkeling. The water is only about 2.5 feet deep for about 200 yards, then the ocean floor just DROPS down really, really deep. We snorkled out to the drop off. Freaky! I saw a lot of cool fish though. I should've invested in a digital camera that can be taken underwater before I left. I could've gotten some sweet photos.

edit: Holy crap! I just hit "publish post" and it gave me an error message! Stupid dial up computer. THANK YOU BLOGGER for auto saving every minute. Nothing in this giant post was lost. Whew!

Hello from the Future!

I am sitting at a computer (dial up - yay!). It is Wednesday, 5/21. 19 hundered hours (military time - hee hee). What time is it for you?

House Tour - toilet room

Ahoha and welcome to our home!

Our master bathroom has what I like to call a 'toilet room'. When we moved in it was plain white. Now it looks like this!

I would like to proudly say that I put up the crown molding on the ceiling and also the molding around the middle. All by myself!

I also made this cute little H thing. Well, I bought the H at a craft store, but I glued down the decorative paper. (Don't look at the ceiling, it's still beigh. I still have to finish painting that. Painting ceilings is a pain, but a great arm workout!)

I bought this white thing from Target. Man, was it a pain in the !@&*^# to put together!!! Those 2 big shells, and all the small shells in the jar are genuine Kwajalein shells. I was extra proud of that giant white one. It was 3/4 buried in the sand when I dug it out.

Speaking of Kwajalein, the photos in the frames along the wall is a 180 degree panoramic of one side of the island.