Hawaii Day 3 – Because We Can’t Think Of A Cool Title

After having several early mornings over the past few days, we decided it would be nice to sleep in a little so we set the alarm for 8:00a.m.  Unfortunately my body still woke be up before the alarm, so I was up at 7:30 and set out to start typing up our blog entries for the trip thus far.  If you have read my three previous posts you can imagine that it took me a little bit to write it all out. By the time I was done typing them up and showering, Tom and I were heading to breakfast at 10:00. We ate at the Kilauea Military Camp cafeteria and had a good breakfast for about half the cost as the previous two mornings.

We finally got on with our day and set out to do some more hikes.  We drove through the length of the park to hike the 1.4 mile Pu’u Loa  petroglyph trail.  Since it was a sunnier day than yesterday, we decided to drive the extra 5 minutes to the Holei Sea Arch at the end of Trail of Craters road to see if we could capture a better picture.  The next trail we hiked was the short 1 mile Devastation Trail.  The final trail on the agenda for today was Earthquake Trail, which actually was an old road through the park that was destroyed by an earthquake.  I found walking on the overgrown abandoned road to be very interesting. The road led us to a nice lookout of the Kilauea caldera.

The next thing on the agenda for today was to go check out the black and green sand beaches and the southern most point in the United States, so it was back in the car for the 1/2 hour drive to Punalu’u Beach.  I enjoyed looking at the black sand beach.  The palm trees against the black sand and blue sky make for a very pretty view.  We were even able to see 3 sea turtles on the beach sunning themselves.  I checked my phone to see if there were any nearby geocaches at the beach and sure enough there was one.  After looking around the wrong tree for 5 minutes, Tom who was standing on the road waiting for me, suggested I check another nearby tree and sure enough I quickly made the find.

It was another 45 minute drive to the green sand beach.  We parked the car and started heading towards what looked to be the trail towards the beach when a local informed us it was a 3 mile one-way hike to the beach.  Seeing as it was already 4:30 we didn’t have enough time for a 6 mile-round trip hike.  The local mentioned that they provide a shuttle service for $15/person. Umm no thanks.  Seeing the green sand beach wasn’t worth that much to me as there was some green sand at the Jagger Museum and I had a hard time telling it was green.  I didn’t want to spend $30 so I could say “Is it really green?”.  So back in the car we went and took the short drive from the green sand beach to the southern most point in the United States.  Here I was able to score three geocaches and some nice views.  Tom watched a local jump off the cliff into a hole of ocean water.  The safety conscious side of me thought this seemed incredibly unsafe and couldn’t even watch.  The guy made the jump and lived, but he did scrape up his elbow pretty bad and mentioned that he somehow injured his groin in the jump.

We made it back to the nearby town before it got dark and ate at a local restaurant.  Tom had a club sandwich (big shocker to all those who know Tom) and I had a BBQ pulled pork plate.  For dessert we both had pie.  Cherry for Tom and banana cream for me.  Everything was delicious!!

We headed back to our lodging and made one last stop at the Jagger museum to view the red glow of the Kilauea caldera, but tonight’s view was the poorest quality of the three days.  We were very fortunate to be able to see it on such a clear night on our first night here.  We were hoping to take more pictures of the stars, but we haven’t seen them since the first night.  Tomorrow morning brings another early morning as we want to eat breakfast here before we head out for the hour drive back to the airport for our 10:30a.m. flight back to Oahu.  We really enjoyed our time hiking around the park.