Day 3 Honeymoon

Day 3 we decided to head down towards Kona and check out the middle part of the island. Our first stop here was at mile marker 82 on Route 19. Here you can see this wonderful view of Kiholo Bay. This is a unique bay because while it's in the ocean, the lava tubes from previous volcanoes, have freshwater that flow threw them, which puts the freshwater on top of the saltwater. We actually went to this bay another day later in the week(you have to drive down a dirt road or hike, story to come) but first enjoy this picture.

Up the highway right near mile marker 91. There is a huge lava tube from the Hualalai lava flow of 1801. It has fallen apart on the ocean side of the road but on the mountain side of the road it has formed a cave.


We kept heading south on route 19 and got into the town of Kona. Kona and Hilo are they two major cities on the Big Island, it's very much like our towns. You will find Wal-Mart,etc. They have a road called Alli Drive here and it's like Philadelphia's South Street. It's loaded with places to eat, shops, and hotels. We acutally came back here our last day to do shopping. So we headed even more south and the weather suddenly changes from 85 degrees sunny, no clouds, to damp and drizzling. They call this area a "luxriant cloud forest." We stopped at this coffee shop called Surfin' Ass to pick up some donkey balls. Sounds gross right, well guess what they aren't!! It's any type of chocolate you want covered over a macadamian nut. Then we headed into the town of Kealakekua, once we got into this town we turned right onto a road called Napoopoo Road, this road leads you to many, many coffee farms. Chris was in heaven with the smell of coffee. I persoanlly dislike coffee, so this was all for Chris. We stopped here at the old Mauna Loa Coffee Mill and Chris got to sample some coffee, he even bought two bags of it(Peaberry Coffee) for guess how much? 60 bucks for 2 bags. Yup, expensive. From here we headed to Kealakekua Bay, this is where you can find the Captian Cook Monument.It's across the bay. They actually say that you can swim across the bay here, and its the best snorkeling site in the BI. They say it take about an hour each way to swim it, or you can hike it, or you can kayak and paddle it, we decided that we would just zoom in with our cameras and see it this way. By the way this road that led us here was one of the craziest, scariest roads we were on in Hawaii. With a moments notice you would be making a sharp turn and it you didn't look, you would go bye bye, right off the cliff. Not to mention the roads in Hawaii besides major highways only really fit one car. Fun stuff, huh? They say there are lots and lots of spinner dolphins that live in the bay as well, but we didn't see any at the time we were there. Some pics:



Next we headed down this road, it was so weird, there was NOTHING, but this road, one lane of course and the vegation was so high, that you couldn't see anything on the sides of you, it was like a road to no where, but it ended up in the town of Pu'uhonua o Honaunau, here the Place of Refuge is located. Here you can pay 5 bucks to get into see this or you can drive just a second down the road and walk over some rocks and the ocean and snap pics, so of course we did that. Some pics:


We headed home after this and driving down our road, we were suddenly stopped, because some our random running friends were in the way:



We had dinner at Roy's, they serve Euro-Asian food here, it was awesome food. Plus we got our first honeymoon desert, for free!!



Day 4 coming up!