Aloha 6

So, when I woke up on day 6 and actually looked out our balcony - this was our view at the hotel:



We had breakfast in the dining area, which was all open to the views and smells of the ocean. Other than chasing little birds away from our food, it was fantastic! :)

We took a little drive to see what we might find for lunch and stopped at an overlook. I didn't take pictures of the view but of some critters on a bush:

Critter 1- Gecko

Critter 2 - potential lunch for Gecko

If it had been really stormy, I would have been worried about where we were staying~

This is the place where we wanted to have lunch. We even picked out the item on a menu.

Unfortunately, when we went back at lunch time, the market was all cleaned up! So, we ate at Subway. We then did some grocery shopping for Sunday lunch where I saw these cute little birds. [not in the store. ;)]

We also hit another WalMart. Why the fascination with WalMart? We needed to find something that we could scrape snow off our car with. AFTER we arrived at the Salt Lake airport to fly to balmy Hawaii, we realized we didn't have a snow scraper in our car. "What if it snows and freezes here, while we're there?", we thought. Kent started to ask someone for a snow scraper, but just couldn't bring himself to do it [for obvious reasons!] So this is what we got instead:

It worked great! ;)

We also took a walk around the Kona temple. We thought we saw a mongoose running around the grounds, but we weren't fast enough to get a picture.

When we returned to our hotel, there was a big event going on. It happens once a year and we happened to be there for it. On the grounds of the hotel they set up booths selling food and all sorts of other things. They also had a stage where they had many hula groups performing. Here's one of the groups:

After watching for a bit, we went exploring out on the lava beach. There are several pre-Christian temples there.

This is an altar of one temple. It actually had offerings on it later in the festivities.

Life in the bay

My fishing habbibi

They had a smaller stage with live entertainment.

This guy was juggling to the music

As the sun began to go down we went and sat on some lounge chairs and read for a bit. These people were trying to chase a turtle back out to sea - they were successful!



This little guy caught a beautiful little fish in his net and tried to convince his dad to let him keep it as a pet.


That evening we had dinner in the Veranda Lounge at the hotel.


They had a live band and people were dancing - sorry I didn't get any pictures! :(
Another perfect day!

Aloha 5

Day 5 we spent at the volcanoes. We drove through the National Park - Kent got to use his card again! :) Very different scenery, but still so beautiful!




There was one area where we walked through a more "junglely" part on our way to a lava tube:

This is me inside the tube. The pictures I took of Kent inside were blurry - shocker!

These were some of the flowers we saw on our walks between look-outs:

What you see behind these flowers, is a crater.

We saw these signs all along the route, but never saw the actual bird. Kind of like the moose in Main! ;)

More craters:

This guy was in one of the parking lots - we love birds, remember!

This is all volcanic rock:

We left the park around 3:00 and I drove us into Kona. It was a l...oooooo...ng drive. The last 40 minutes was windy roads. I was so exhausted by the time we got to the hotel that this is what I did for the rest of the evening:


I was asleep by about 8:30. I guess I'm not 100% yet, huh?