We went to Hawaii!

After our daughter Gwen passed away last year, Larry’s family got together and gave us a vacation. One of his cousins had a timeshare she did not want to use due to the impending birth of her first grandchild, and the others chipped in for airfare. We decided to visit Hawaii (the Big Island) and scheduled our trip for right after Thanksgiving.

Neither of us had been there before and we tried our best to take in as much as possible. We saw lots of black lava beaches.

And spotted this sea turtle in a tide pool. He was snacking on algae.

We took an historical sunset dinner cruise and saw a whale! It was about a week early for whale season but we got lucky. The native Hawaiian historian on board was not only very well versed on his state’s past, but he played a mean blues harmonica.

We saw these windmills on the northern peninsula. Don’t they look pretty against the ocean? Hawaii is humid as well as windy, so don’t spend much time on your hair if you go there.

The natives were very friendly, although these guys were a little stiff.

The most amazing thing we saw was Volcano National Park. There was no red hot flowing lava to be seen the day we were there, so we spent some time walking around on old lava flows.

I could not get used to seeing holiday decorations going up when the weather was tropical and balmy. And it was totally surreal to watch these adorable ballerinas dancing scenes from the Nutcracker outside in December!

There is so much more to show and tell! We’ll cover it all in later posts. For now I will leave you with this beautiful sunset we snapped on our last night on the island.

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Tags: Hawaii, lava, nutcracker, sea turtle, volcano, windmills