Big Island

During Christmas, we were brainstorming ideas on where to go for winter break and being undecided we let the man of the house (our spunky four year old) pick our final vacation destination.  This being low risk since he has been talking about Hawaii for awhile (although to be fair he is equally obsessed with Antarctica...so we had a 50/50 shot of being somewhere nice and tropical or freezing our bums off).  Sure enough, when placed in front of the map mural in his room he pointed to Hawaii.  E was especially excited to go to the Big Island because he wanted to see a volcano.

Day One:

Excited on the plane!  E made fast friends on the flight with a girl who sat in the row before us and they spent the whole flight chatting about all the sights they could see from their windows.  The convo was fairly entertaining as sometimes they would comment on their own comments even if the other person was talking about something else.

E's new picture face:  a scrunchie with a smile. Still loves studying plane propellers and how the wing flaps changes as the plane takes off and lands.  

View from our hotel lobby.  We stayed at the Sheraton in Kona.

First new friend spotted by the pool.

Hungry after our plane ride, and with our rooms not quite ready, we headed off to Da Poke Shack for something to eat.  Ono!

First beach of the trip:  Kahaluu Beach Park.  This was a great place for snorkeling and spotting sea life in the tide pools!  There is a bathroom at the park and also you can conveniently buy snorkel gear here as well.  The beach is super rocky however, and since we didn't have water shoes, it was pretty hard to walk around.  E and Bob were able to get by with their flip flops and crocs, but I had neither and so got a pretty bad cut on the bottom of my foot that made it a bit difficult to walk around for the next day or two.  Water shoes were our very next purchase.

First mission at the beach was to build a sand castle.  The beach was more on the rocky rather than sandy side, but we were successful on our third attempt.

Looking for sea life in the tide pools.

We spotted some sea urchins and fish and turtles.

Trying to be a fish in the water.

Loving the waves.

After the beach we headed back to the hotel, grabbed a quick dinner and called it an early night because the next day we were off to explore Hawaii Volcanoes National Park!