To Hawaii!
Continuing our tradition of taking roadtrip vacations, Alex and I have now ventured to Hawaii. What’s that, you say? You can’t get to Hawaii via car? Well, fine. That’s true - we did fly here. But we have in fact rented a car to drive ourselves around the Big Island.
Upon landing in Hawaii, wee were immediately struck by the open air concourse at the airport, with gardens where you can wait for your flight, and birds flying up to the gates. It was the least-sterile-feeling airport I’ve flown through.
After hopping islands over to Hilo, picked up our rental car to start our road trip. The Hilo airport is tiny - not quite as small as New Haven’s 2-gate Tweed airport, but it was Tweed after eating a Mario mushroom. The parking lot is literally across the street from the airport.
We immediately headed down to our hotel (if you can call it that) - the Volcano Rainforest Retreat. Here, be jealous:
Not content to enjoy our lodgings, we went out to Volcano National Park to view the Halema'uma'u Crater. This turned out to be a good idea because - unlike most days - we actually got to see lava sloshing around in the crater:
Of course, since it’s an active volcano and the park service isn’t crazy, you only get to look at it from half a mile away.
At night, it becomes glowy. Fortunately, we got there just as nightfall was setting in, so we got to contrast the “boring” daytime version with the nighttime “glowy” version:
That was about it for us on the first day of the trip - it turns out that being 3 hours offset makes you really tired at an absurdly early hour.
