Life is good…

… hanging out in Hawaii.

We are having a great time. Saturday night we got checked in, unpacked, groceries put away, and into bed by 9pm local time. Not bad if you ignore that it was 3am east coast time and we had been up since 5:30 am east coast time.

The flights and layovers were all easy and good. It’s a different world – we had to buy food at each airport or hope they still had a meal left to pay for on the flight. I got some good reading done – I really enjoyed The Yada Yada Prayer Group for our book club this month! Quite different from the John Adams bio we read for last month.

Sunday we went to the Waikoloa Baptist Church and were treated to great praise songs and good Bible preaching. We’ll be back there next Sunday. That night we went to a luau at the Marriott down the street. The food was good, we had good conversation in our group of seven, plus a couple from Honolulu (retired military from Wisconsin). The show was fun, especially the guy doing the fire show.

Monday was a long day driving over to the east coast of the Big Island. We saw the Umauma waterfalls and the World Botanical Garden. Then down to the Akaka State Park where we hiked out to see more waterfalls. We ate our bologna sandwiches there and stopped at a small strip of shops there. One shop was fantastic – the things she sold were made in Hawaii and reasonably priced. The one to the right was selling stuff made in Thailand and the Philippines, and the one to the left was expensive stuff.

We drove on through Hilo and out to the Volcano visitor center. We were hoping to see some lava flow and had planned to go to the winery as well. But while we were at the crater overlook we saw people walking down on the crater and of course that suddenly was more important than our other plans. We walked through the Thurston lave tube and then hiked down to the crater. In 1959 that particular crater exploded and in 36 hours put out a lot of lava and stuff. Over the next 30 hours years it cooled and hardened and now we can walk on it. Then we hiked back up and drove back to Hilo for a nice dinner at Cafe Pesto. Smoked Salmon Alfredo – yumm!

The east coast is a rain forest so we spent most of the day walking and driving in the rain. We back on the sunny dry side of the island now. I woke up this morning and before I could change my mind I put on my running clothes and headed out. It was brighter here than it is at home at 6:30 these days. I got a good 25 minute run in along the road around this area. Lots of others out doing the same thing.

Now we’re off to make leis and then tonight we have a dinner cruise along the west coast. We’re grilling tuna and salmon for lunch. Back to it….