The big island

We have some great friends out here. My and my friend shirlyn were talking about switching and doing little getaways for our husbands. We started talking about it in October and we both planned ours and the time came for us to take ours. David was out to sea as I was planning ours so it made the anticipation ever more since I couldn't tell him what I was doing well.

Pool side at the Hale Koa

It was a much needed R&R time for us with how much he has been gone away. We spent the first night in Waikiki at the Hale koa. We were going to hike diamond head but got down there and come to find out it is closed on the weekdays. So we checked in and went and laid by the pool. Then we went to the Ala moana mall shopped a little then we went to dinner. The next day we headed to the big island. We flew into kona and drove to the volcano national park. There are some military cottages there. Our first stop was to see the temple. It is a small temple but gorgeous just like the rest of them.

Kona Temple

We thought it would be nice to drive around the island a little bit. It is so green and the contrast between the green and the lava rocks is really cool. We made a few stops along the way. One was a black sand beach. It is really cool to see black sand beach. We also stopped at a look out point were we saw a guy enjoying the good life with his stuffed pig hanging out of his car,

off to the water

Chill in with a pet pig awesome

We got to the volcano national park and stopped at the steam vents. There was a walkway we took that looked into the crater. It was cool. The setting was perfect it was cloudy and started raining and to drive down the road and see the steam coming out of the ground was really cool.

steam vents

The one thing I really wanted to do was See the lava flow into the water. There was no visible lava flow that day. Darn it. We went to a museum that has a lookout point and at night if there is lava flowing you can see the seam light up. It was really cool. Just as we got to the sot it was bright red and pink and orange. We stayed there a few minutes then as we were leaving it started to die down and it was changing colors like it was when we first got there so good timing on our part.

the many glowing pictures I will just spare you to look at one

The military cottages at the park are the way to go. They are cottages that have fireplaces. They have one bedroom up to three bedroom cottages. When we pulled up the first row of cottages were decorated with Christmas lights. It was really cool. Since it was cold(had to buy a sweatshirt since conveniently forgot mine and Davids), rainy, foggy. It was nice to get a change of weather and really felt wintry with all the fog and rain. The night we were there it was rainy and cold. We put a log in the fireplace. It was nice to say that while living in Hawaii we had a fire in a fireplace once.

All ready for Christmas

the front room of the cottage.