Wednesday haWaii Pictures

We are letting the Mom take over the blog today to post some pictures from their trip to Hawaii.  They spent 8 days on the Big Island of Hawaii and enjoyed an amazing variety of sights and experiences.  

1.  Mauna Kea beach.    They did NOT stay at this hotel, which is way above their price range, but were able to go to the beach because in Hawaii, there has to be public access to all the beaches.  The hotel had a limited number of about 20 parking spaces for "outsiders" to park so by going early they were able to get the last one.   There are very few nice white sand beaches on this island and this is one of the nicest.

2.   The North end of the beach where they went snorkeling

3.    Mauna Kea mountain/volcano (not active now).  This is the tallest mountain in the world if you measure from the sea floor, taller than Everest.      They did not go to the very top, over 14,000 feet above sea level where several observatories are, but they went to the visitor center at 9000 feet, and then hiked to the top of a hill that looked out at the view and back at the visitor center, which is the third building back shown below.

4.    Sunset view from the condo they stayed at.  It looked like some sort of variation on this every single night.  Such monotony!

5.   There is a green sea turtle poking its head up in the middle of this picture at a black sand beach.     It looks like a dot just behind the wave, slightly to the left of the center.    They watched several turtles in the surf for quite a while.

6.    The Kilauea crater.       There is molten lava inside there but it is not escaping from the crater now.  There IS lava flowing down the side of Kilauea from a rift, down to the ocean.

7.  At night you can see the red from the molten lava reflected by the steam cloud.   This is zoomed in a bit compared to the previous picture.

8.  They hiked from the visitor center down to the caldera of Kilauea, through lush vegetation like this:

9.  This is how it looked at the bottom

10.    It rained the last day, but they still got out there with rain gear (= an umbrella).     The flowers looked especially interesting in the rain.