Hawaii the Big Island Kona

Hawaii, Kona 2008

We did eat some really good food and right by the ocean with good friends made it so cool!!

Finally I am making some time to post about my trip to Hawaii. We had an amazing time!!!

This is who we went with. Mitchel's brother Randy & his wife Jenny and our friends Chad & Stephanie. Where do I being. I'll start out with our scuba dives.

I am amazed at the world God created in the ocean. Truly is so fascinating it's hard to put into words. Two huge Eagle Rays swam by. This I have to say scared me a bit because how it works in the water is there is a huge reef that goes along the island and then in drops off into a deep, dark, blue nothing. Well the Eagle Rays were in the deep, dark nothing and we followed them going about 80 feet deep. Really watching my surrounding's making sure a shark would not appear it was hard for me to enjoy these beautiful creatures. Once we got back into the reef part I felt better. Considering I am not a pro diver and this was only my 5 th dive I have done. We did two different dives that day. My dive master in Arizona told us to go to this place in Kona and they took us out on their boat & took us to two different places to dive. It really was so much fun. We were going to do a night dive & I just couldn't bring myself to do it. We have a movie of us diving I will try to post that later, but not sure if it will work. It's kind of long. So another cool thing we did was take a small air plane ride around the island. It was SO COOL!!!

We got to see the live and active since Feb. Kilauea. These pics are where the lava is meeting the ocean. If you look closely you can see inside one of the lava tubes and the bright red lava flowing. It was really cool. These pics don't do justice.

It took 2 1/2 hours to fly around this big island. One side where most of the resorts are and the airport Waimea (North side) is not that pretty. Hardly any beaches & mostly black sand beaches. Black old lava everywhere. Then on Hilo side (East side) of island is SO BEAUTIFUL! Water falls everywhere and just green!!! OK onto the next thing. We went snorkeling a couple of times and on one of the trips we rented kayaks and about half to Cook's Island we all of a sudden were surrounded by a TON of dolphins. This was one of those moments that I felt that God was saying "Hi, see what I created". You know instead of a beautiful sun set this day we got amazing animals right beside us. We got out of the little boats and I just layed on top of the water face down with snorkel and watched as they swam right underneath me. The boys were a little bit more daring in the fact that they got so close to the wild animals. Chad actually touched one of them they got so close. You can see his arm and how close we were to them. This was not in some controlled Sea World environment. This was in the somewhat middle of the wild ocean.

Once we got to Cook's Island we snorkeled there for a long time. I was doing good and fine minding my own business when an eel swam right underneath me. I freaked out a bit. I hate eel's.

The sea turtles are so use to people I think because they swam right by us. If you get caught touching a turtle you will be fined 25,000. No worries on my end. Pretty to look at no need to get bit. So in a small nut shell this was our trip. We had a ton of fun and many really cool experiences. So glad we got this opportunity to go. I have over 300 pictures. It was so hard to choose which ones to post. We got amazing pictures in our scuba dives. Anyways it was really cool!!!!