The Big Island, Hawaii

On Monday December 1st, we finally made it to Hawaii. Our first stop was the big island, Hawaii. We had rented a car for this island because we knew we wanted to see a couple of different places. We ended up being able to go to four different places. If we had used the boats excursion for this it would have been $400 dollars per person. Crazy how much they charge for those. Our first place to go was a hike to a waterfall called Akaka Falls. My visiting teaching partner recommended going because it was short which would be good for the kids. We had really wanted to do a hike in Kaui to this beach and it passed a bunch of waterfalls but the hike was an hour and a half away from the port and we didn't have enough time on the island for that so we decided to do this hike instead. On the way to the Falls, we left the main rode and took the scenic drive for a few miles. These were some picutres from the scenic drive. They don't do it justice though. It was too pretty to capture on my camera.

Dallin and I were so glad we did because that was the prettiest thing we saw on our trip. We passed by a Botanical garden and wanted to stop but didn't know if we would have enough time because we wanted to go out to the volcanoes and didn't know how long everything would take.
I love Kalea's finger up the nose in this picture.

Akaka Falls was beautiful. The hike was short enough that kids wanted to run the whole way. We tried to convince them to walk and enjoy the beauty but they wanted to run. They did stop a few times to check something out that we pointed at. Kalea liked being able to walk herself.
Our next stop was the volcanoes. It was the opposite direction from the port then the Falls. It was a little windy so when we got there we found out that you couldn't go to where the lava is actually flowing because the air was too dangerous for people's health. We got to see the big crater but we didn't hike down into it because of Dalek's asthma. Here is a couple of pictures from that.
We didn't stay too long at the volcanoes and decided to move on to a new thing to see. I will continue with this island on my next post.