Hawaii scenic shots

Well, the Hawaii pictures won out after all on what to blog next :) We just couldn't wait any longer to get them up. There are more - if you can beleive!! Thousands to be exact! LOL. It took us SO long to narrow it down and work on the photos that were our faves and I did have to leave LOTS out still. I stuck to showing more scenic, landscape, detail type shots. There were so many wonderful shots of us and the things we did too but I could have posted for days if I went ahead with those ones too :O

We hope you enjoy a little taste of Hawaii - I enjoyed looking at them again b/c even though we've been back for less than a month and a half it seems like it was YEARS since we went!!!

Thurston Lava Tube ....

Bamboo ...

Rainbow Falls, Hilo Hawaii

We met the sweetest lady here selling fish, birds and baskets made out of palm leaves and she also sold home made bamboo flutes which our daughter bought as a spcial treat for herself :) She plays the French Horn and Trumpet so music is an important part of her life...

Shopping in Hilo...

This was the MOST amazing Scenic drive I've ever been on!! Incredible trees that covered the roads and when you looked up it was looking into a sky full of leaf clouds!! At spots we would get out and just gaze at the ocen and cliffs and watch the waves splashing up just feet away from where we stood on the black cliffs! This was also a tropical rainforest so the vegetation was incredibly lush everywhere we went!! ....

Our little friendly lizzard - he was eating some pineapple. I think we were too nice to them and ended up having one inside the condo with us. I could hear it clicking in the night and KNEW it was up on the ceiling watching me!!! ack! lol.

Lava Rock. It's almost like being on the moon or a desolate planet! Really quite amazing though .....

There were some beautiful picturesque towns here and there ....

FERNS!!! Really BIG ferns!! Ranger Dean told us that the ferns grow aprox. 1 foot every 5 to 7 years. Some of the ferns we saw had to be 7 feet tall themselves so they were around 35 to 49 years old!!

What an incredible flower the Hibiscus is!! Some of them were SO thick they were like plastic!! We found one in GREAT shape on the ground and tried to press it but it just didn't work. They are best when fresh for sure .....

Fiddleheads... the start of the fern....

Beautiful sunsets of course .....

We were on the Big Island - the one actually called Hawaii. Not many people visit there but it's got everything the other islands have and MORE!! They have almost every eco-system there is so we saw it all from prairie, mountain, snow, tropical and rainforest, to barren lava rock! The biggest perk of the big island is getting to see the lava flow. I can't beleive I didn't incude a pic of it here :( silly me - I'll have to rectify that! It was definitely COOL. We also got to see white sand beaches, salt and pepper sand beaches, black sand beaches and we unfortunately did not attempt the hike down to the green sand beach.

Anyway, we thought this shot next was cool - very similar to the wheat here at home!!! ....

This is Waiapio Valley. We did NOT attempt the hike down into this valley - we actually did Pololu Valley instead which is a smaller valley on the other side of this one and we enjoyed sitting on a black sand beach at the bottom and putting our feet in the too dangerous for swimming waters before we made the DREADED BRUTAL hike back up. LOL.....

Very prairie - like around Waimea - cowboy country!

Place of Refuge. Great story here but to make it short - if you broke the law you could risk the crashing waves and sharks to swim into this place and if you did achieve that - you were forgiven and could go back to your normal life. This was a place where royalty lived.....