Let's fling ourselves down a mountain!

Excursion #3: Booked.

We scheduled our Haleakala Sunrise Bike Tour today. We are going pretty early on in our honeymoon. It'll be our first real activity, so I'm sure we'll be ridiculously excited for it. And you need to be ridiculously excited for it.

The pick-up time for the shuttle? 2:10 a.m.

Yes, you read that right. We're going to be picked up in the middle of the night. Why? So we can be driven in a van to the top of a volcano/mountain (at 10,000 ft. elevation) and watch the sunrise. But, you see, it's not just any sunrise. It's this sunrise:

At 10,000 ft., you are above the clouds. The sunrise is spectacular because you get to see the sun come through the clouds. Sounds pretty amazing to me. So what the hell, we're doing it.

Then, once we watch the sunrise spectacle (oh, and mind you, it's only 30 degrees up there... we'll be freezing our asses off), we'll climb on some borrowed mountain bikes and literally fling ourselves down the side of the volcano on them for 28 miles. Gotta love it. I'm actually slightly frightened of the bike riding part... there are quite often injuries, and there have even been deaths. But our guide book says 70,000 people do this every year, so I just hope we're two of the many who make it down unscathed.

We get to wear one of these fun outfits, too:

Ha, I love it. The people look like spacemen. They actually give you those suits to help you keep warm at the top of the mountain when waiting for sunrise, and also at the beginning of the descent on the bikes. It's my understanding that at some point, on the way down, the temperature rises quite nicely and you get to stop to shed all of that stuff (except your motorcycle helmet).

We ended up booking through Mountain Riders because according to our trusty dusty Revealed guide, they get up to the mountain the earliest, and therefore get to start the descent the earliest. The other companies have to wait in line, sometimes for a few hours, to start their groups down the mountain.

This should be fun, though. Our friends got married last summer and did this on their honeymoon in August, and they highly recommended it.

By the time we get back to our condo, it'll probably be around noon. We'll have already been awake for 10 hours. I can tell you one thing for certain: The itinerary for the remainder of that day will involve a lot of lying around in the sun.

For those of you interested in this activity, the current online booking price is $136 per person. CHA-CHING!