HAWAII 4-0

Our best friends got married in Hawaii on the rim of Haleakala at sunrise, and being as Miki and I were not only the witnesses, best man and bridesmaid, but also the entire wedding party, we rejoin them every five years to celebrate the event. This year they will have survived twenty years of marital bliss, so the four of us have again embarked on yet another island adventure, this time on the Kona coast of the Big Island.

For those of you who have never been there, the reason they call it the “Big Island” is that if you put all the other Hawaiian islands side by side, they still wouldn’t occupy half the land mass of Hawaii. This means that driving from one place to another takes many hours, and if you plan on returning to where you started from, count on spending most of the day in the car. Still, I loved Kona with its sunny days, coffee plantations growing on volcanic hillsides, and sparkling sand beaches lapped by incredibly warm waves. Thanks to one of the locals from the nearby surf shop, we found a secluded sand beach where the trees grew right to the edge of the water, providing shade for those who didn’t feel like cooking in the warm mid-day sun. The cove protects the reef growing every imaginable kind and color corral fantasies from deep purple to bright yellow, teeming with a variety of tropical fish. Over many years of snorkeling and diving, it was the most spectacular spot I’ve ever found. I was really sorry I didn’t have an underwater camera to record what I witnessed, so your imaginations will have to make do.

A week on a Hawaiian vacation disappears in a wink, and our time there flew by faster then the clouds blown about by the warm trade winds. For those of you interested in details, I refer you to my friend Michael’s site at www.travelingcurmudgeon.com for a more expansive (though somewhat biased) view of our trip. For the rest of you, here are a few photos from Paradise.

Be well,

J.