Hawaii Part 1

We got home yesterday from the coolest vacation ever. (Thank you, Papa Bear. Happy Birthday to me! :)) In order to try and keep this from being the longest blog post in history, I'm only going to give very short labels to the pics, and I'm going to try and not post all 300+ of them. :P We went to the Big Island. We stayed on the Kona side of the island, which was not at all what I expected. The landscape was just miles and miles of volcanic rock, which was fascinating to see, but was not what I had envisioned. The other side of the island, the Hilo side, gets more rain (it rained on us while we were exploring it, actually) and so is much more tropical like I always thought Hawaii would be. Interestingly, though, the volcanic side had much better beaches, so I'm glad that's the side where we stayed.

Note: Blogger isn't wanting to let me do all the pics on one post, so this is now Part 1. :) I'll post the White Sand Beach and the Luau in Part 2. :)

The beach at the hotel

These signs are everywhere.

So are these guys. :P

Feeding the little bird who showed up during breakfast at the deli down the street from the hotel.

Aloha sheep :P

Crawdad on the slide at the hotel pool

Hot tub full of kids :P

Love this one :)

Papa Bear and the slide. Giggle.

Gathering white coral to make a picture in the black volcanic rock. It's like the Hawaii version of graffiti, except that it's both pretty and legal. :)

This is the jeep we rented, top down.

This is Crawdad and Taz thinking that the trade winds made the top down a little too windy.

We are at the southernmost point in the US here. See how everyone has a grip on Taz? Behind us is a sheer cliff that is a VERY long drop into the ocean. And the wind was crazy. We were all afraid that she would just blow right over the edge.

After the southernmost point, we headed toward the Green Sand Beach.

Randon pics on the way to the Green Sand Beach.

When we got there, we found that Green Sand Beach was in a cove. This is the view from above.

Crawdad and I at the top of the cove

Down on the beach. I wish you could see how green the sand was, but it doesn't show well in the pictures.

Cub climbed halfway back up and struck a pose. :P

Yeah, they got me up there with them. :P

This is the "road" we had to drive on in order to get to Green Sand Beach. But, as per our rental agreement, we weren't offroading. No really, we weren't.

Our first visit to Black Sand Beach. It was dusk when we got there, so we didn't stay long that day.

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Visiting the Hilo side of the island. It's much greener here.

I love these trees with their big orange flowers. They were all over the island.

Drinking from a coconut. They literally just lopped off the top, and stuck a straw in it. I never realized how much actual pure liquid was inside these things.

Notice the steam rising from the ground? We are standing at the edge of the opening of the volcano crater and it's steaming up from underground.

Yeah, that's the crater of an active volcano right there. Wow!

After we saw the crater, we walked the lava beds, which were really cool.