HAWAII 2007 - Part I

June 7-10: The Big Island

The whole reason for my trip to Hawaii was that my dad was throwing my brother Erwin, who graduated from high school, and I a graduation party. I invited all of my cousins and fortunately 3 of them were able to come with me! Novette and Ben came with me to the Big Island and Maryann met up with us on Oahu.

The trip started off a little rough -- we missed our flight!! Fortunately, after four hours, we were able to catch the last flight out of LAX on stand-by. We picked up the car, checked into our room and rested up for the next day. Below is the view from our hotel room at the Royal Kona Resort.

The next day we ventured south to the Volcano National Park to see the active volcano and hot lava. On the way down we stopped by random beaches to lay out and take pictures as well as a Kona coffee farm. After hiking thru lava rock in the drizzling rain, we still didn't even get to see the molten lava. At best we saw a red light in the distance that came from the lava. It was dark, raining and we were exhausted so we made our way home without dinner :(

Day 2 we explored the north side of the island; and by "explored" I mean we drove up the coast until we hit a dead end. That dead end was Polulu Valley. We hiked down the valley to the beach, played around in the little camping area, hiked back up and drove back to the hotel in Kona. There we had our last and only dinner on the Big Island at Don the Beachcomber. Not only did it have great food, but it had a great view.

Novette and I decided to go out and drink since it was our last night on the island. On our way to the bar and while at the bar, we got stopped by TWO groups of people who thought we were locals. One asked us where was a good place to eat(they followed us into the bar we randomly chose) and another wanted to take a picture with us(we should have charged them money).

The next day we took my cousin Ben to the airport, returned to the hotel and laid out for an hour or so. We got to the Kona airport an HOUR early, they couldn't find our names on the reservation and we missed our flight AGAIN!!! Good thing inter-island flights run every 30 minutes or so. We landed in Oahu safely. Stay tuned for the next installment of Hawaii 2007!

Here are more pictures(complete with captions) of the Big Island.