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Going to Hawaii

My homeward journey slowly continues... Friday morning I'm flying to Hawaii and will be hanging out with Craig for a week; he's at the University of Hawaii getting his Master's Degree in music. We haven't seen each other or hung out in over a year, it outghta be great.

I've been reading up on Hawaii, as its history is fascinating- human sacrifice to McDonald's in ~150 years, incredible... very similar to New Zealand. Both places' indigenous cultures descend from the same Pacific Island culture. While Europe was still in the pits of the Dark Ages around the year 1000 CE and there were no white people in North America, the Islanders were sailing their huge canoes (~60 people + animals + supplies) on 40-day voyages covering, literally, thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean, navigating purely from the positions of stars and ocean currents. They lived sustainably with the environment and suffered from no diseases. Then white folks (whalers, traders, etc.) arrived in the early 1800s, including a whole gang of missionaries from Yale, and Christianized the whole place. Something like 2/3 of the Hawaiian population was wiped out from measles and other assorted ailments due to their arrival.