We took a two day trip to the other side of the island, mainly to see Volcanoes National Park and let Kyla do their ranger program. Having been there before, we had several places that we wanted to go back to and we wanted to do some hiking this time. The first place we went is back to the sea arch.
Kyla wanted to pose for pictures. Although it was VERY windy so it was hard to keep her hair out of her face.
We then did a hike to the petroglyphs. The Hawaiians that lived here would take the umbilical cords of their children and bury them in this area hoping to give their children long life.
The kids (yes that includes Adam) on the hike.
After checking into the hotel we ventured out to the lava viewing area. You can see the steam in the background where lava is flowing into the ocean. We heard in the morning that the flow had stopped and were very happy to see that it had started up again.
After hiking about 1/2 mile you could see the lava going into the ocean. I put the camera on continuous so that I could just hold down the button and it would keep taking pictures---that way I would hopefully get some good pictures (it had worked well getting the wave pictures). It worked well here--but now I have about 500 pictures to go through and get the best--almost too many of them turned out good. I picked a few showing how it changed as it got darker.
This was the view from the hotel in the early morning. I was hoping to get a sunrise picture, but I didn't know that the hotel was too far in the bay and even though we got an ocean view room we were facing northwest, rather than to the east. However, this is Mauna Kae--the tallest mountain on the island and its rare to be able to see the top as its usually covered by clouds.
Since we had not finished everything in the park, we drove back to the park. We first hiked through the rain forest--its amazing that underneath is lava rock.
After the hike we finished Kyla's Junior Ranger Program. She was very excited to get a backpack for finishing the junior ranger programs for all 5 parks on the island. Its a very nice backpack.
We then went to Thurston Lava Tube. AJ fell asleep on the way there--and stayed asleep while Adam carried him thru the tube. I wish he would have stayed awake because he would have liked walking thru the tunnel-but he just didn't want to wake up.
And of course, I had to make sure to take some flower pictures :)
After finishing in the park, we went back to Hilo. We walked to Coconut Island (the Island that you could see from the hotel). Kyla was disappointed that we didn't have swim stuff for her to go swimming--although we didn't really have time anyways.
We walked through a little bit of the Japanese garden but the path was flooded so we weren't able to walk through much of it. But Kyla was good at posing for pictures.
AJ wasn't really into posing. You can see in the background the pavilion that Kyla was on in the last picture--she walked thru the water to get to it.
We also walked a little bit of Banyan Drive. These trees were planted by famous people in the 1930s. This particular tree was planted by King George V. We also saw ones planted by Babe Ruth and FDR. But they are hard to get pictures of.
And on the way home we stopped on the side of the road to get a picture of Mauna Kae. In this picture you can see the observatories at the top.
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