Pillboxes

Last weekend, I hiked Pillboxes in Lanikai to celebrate my friend Daiva's 17th birthday. This is a picture of us defying gravity. It took several tries to finally get a picture with all of us in the air because gravity very quickly draws everything towards the center of the earth at an acceleration of 9.8m/s^2. Our incredibly skilled photographer had to snap the photo at exactly the right time.

As we were sitting on the top of one of the pillboxes, the conversation took a morbid turn when my friend Sara said that if she had to commit suicide for some horrible reason, she would want to do it there, at Pillboxes because its so beautiful and free. This other guy then said that he would jump off a skyscraper instead because as he put it, "What if you jump off a cliff here and don't die? Then your life would just suck." A skyscraper, he said, would ensure immediate death upon impact with the ground. The reason jumping off a tall skyscraper is more deadly is because since it is higher, you will accelerate even more than if you jumped off a shorter cliff. Okay I'm done with the morbidness. Just thinking about that conversation gives me chills because I'm scared of heights. Don't worry, Doc, none of us are anywhere near suicidal.

The beginning of this hike is very tiring because it is fairly steep. Coming back down is the worst though. I nearly ate it at least ten times because my shoes kept slipping on the loose dirt and rocks. When you go hiking, its a good idea to wear shoes that have a good grip on the bottom to prevent such slipping and sliding. Shoes with ridges on the bottom keep you from falling because they dig into the dirt which creates friction. Shoes where the ridges on the bottom have been worn down, (like mine, apparently) have no ridges to dig into the dirt and therefore slide around on the rocks.