Hawaii - Last Post

I promise I’m done talking about Hawaii after this last post.

We’ve had lots of other things going on but Hawaii is a topic that makes me happy. 

The boys attended their Sunday School classes via zoom making everyone jealous of their Hawaiian backgrounds and then we loaded up in our van to drive to Hilo, the wet side of the island, to see some waterfalls and the volcano. We drove across the island which takes over an hour so the boys weren’t happy about that. The scenery was so different as we went through flat, barren ugliness and descended into wet, lush, rainforest at the end.  My boys couldn’t have cared less. 

We had low expectations but they weren’t low enough!  The volcano used to have impressive lava flow until a couple years Svir but then it started flowing again but you can’t really see anything unless it’s getting dark or you fly in a helicopter. So we saw lots of lava rock and lots of steam and checked the volcano off our bucket list. 

The huge volcanic crater with steam rising out of it

We saw a couple different waterfalls which were pretty but we have lots of waterfalls here in WA so it wasn’t spectacular.

Can we all feel some embarrassment for Marcus’s clothing?  He wore his horrible workout shirt so he could still get tan and brought his hood in case it rained. Well, it was pouring rain which means there’s no sun but whatever. And we laughed to tears at Henry in the backpack. Thankfully no hiking was involved.

Clearly Landon was thrilled to spend a day on the rainy side of the island 

Poor Henry :)

Even the lush jungle was impressive to us and we know green

After a lot of driving and a lot of rain, we scored at an amazing burger joint for lunch. Even Marcus was full after pounding down his giant burger. 

Check out that HUGE tree!

Open Wide...

Food coma for sure

We finished off our last day with one last beach adventure. Randy found it and told us we’d have to hike about a half hour across lava rock and we decided we could do hard things and packed up for an adventure. The beach was beautiful!  The hike was terrible. Parker was complaining and I said, “this is tropical paradise!” To which he quickly responded, “more like SUCK paradise!”  We died laughing. Oh to be a young, spoiled child. 

The sand was so soft and untouched

So beautiful and definitely the type of beach we were used to in Okinawa

The sunset on our last night was gorgeous. We always ended each night at the clubhouse pool

And this is the lava rock that is everywhere which is a stark contrast to the beautiful green you expect to see. I ran along this trail for awhile and finally realized there was nothing to see and I’d break my ankle if it wasn’t careful.