Big Island!

After racing across Maui back to the airport, we flew on to the Big Island and landed in Kona. Kona is pretty much just touristy and full of people. The beaches didn't even look that great. We spent a night in Kona and then worked our way south along the coast exploring anything that looked interesting and then headed up to Volcano, HI. We stayed there two nights and explored Volcano National Park. The Chain of Craters road was fun. It goes all the way down to the coast along a line of various craters and ends up at a pretty recent lava flow that creates a barrier on the road. The noxious fumes in the area were starting to get to us eventually though, so we headed off to Hilo. Hilo is wet and gorgeously green! The town looks like a ghost town, but it's much more real instead of the fake touristy feeling of Kona. We stayed at a hostel that was literally in the middle of a botanical garden. It was pretty awesome! One evening we drove out to the viewing area for the currently active lava flow. It was pretty cool, even if for the most part you could only see the reflection of the red hot lava on the steam that it created when it poured into the ocean. We did see a few sprays of actual lava fly up though. One day we drove up Mauna Kea and did a little tour of one of the observatories. Then we sat up there until sunset, after which we drove back down to the visitor center where they had a bunch of telescopes out for people to view various things in the night sky. We had a great time looking at stars and galaxies and talking with all the geeky star people there who knew so much. The next day was my last day in Hawaii, so we drove around the north end of the island back to Kona to fly back to Honolulu. We had a bit of time to hang out there, so Jeff and I found a sushi restaurant for dinner before I had to go back to the airport to fly home.