Aloha!

I'm on the big island of Hawaii this week. We arrived yesterday afternoon, after a practically sleepless Friday night (we had to be up at 5 am to catch our flight, and none of us really finished packing until past midnight...) and a long Saturday of travel. We attempted to stay up until a reasonable "bed time," since Hawaii time is 4 hours behind Austin time -- but my head hit the pillow at 9 pm and I was immediately out like a light.

But this morning the sun was shining, we had a great breakfast, we found a Starbucks, and we were all ready to explore the island. This island is definitely different than Maui, the only other Hawaiian island we've visited. It's the youngest of the islands, and it's still growing daily -- we're hoping to visit the Kilauea Volcano later this week, where you can get up close and personal with the lava (hopefully not TOO up close and personal). But even driving around this part of the island, you can see pretty recent volcanic rock -- most of it is from the 1800's, which, geologically-speaking, was practically this morning. It makes for a very interesting landscape.

Today we drove up to the northern part of the island to explore a bit, and we just returned to the hotel. I think we'll be heading out to the beach soon, but I thought I'd download my pictures so far and post a few:

The view from our hotel balcony...

Some of the lava rock landscape...

Kinda scary one-lane road we decided to drive down, to see what the view was like at the bottom...

And we did finally reach the end of the road, where we had a view of Maui off in the distance...

Me and Rick...

Little coffee shop where we stopped in the middle of our drive -- lots of Kona coffee around here, which is really nice. :)

And dad and I decided we have a new hero -- coffee dog! (This picture was on the wall of the coffee shop...)

That's all for now... I'm sure I'll have plenty more tomorrow... :)