Aloha from the Big Island

Hey, reader(s),

Just going to drop a bit of a report here at the rough mid point of this trip.  Being not a true "Big Pig" family-style adventure, I'm not going to be doing full reports, but I did want to get some stuff on the site so I don't forget it all in my dotage.

James is in Danville with Grandma and Grandpa, and Erica and I have come to Hawai'i for a week to celebrate our 10th Anniversary early (summer is already booked up, can you believe it?)

We landed in Kona's mostly-outdoor airport the morning of March 29, after having flown to Los Vegas and then on to LA the night before, and overnighting at a hotel near LAX.  The airport was filled with a bunch of grumpy-looking, sunburned people headed home, and among them happy new arrivals streaming toward baggage claim. That's us :) Though soon we will be them :( Quod es, fui, Qui sum: ecce concipies.

Our first stop was...Safeway for groceries.  But then on to our lovely beach hotel, the King Kamehameha Beach Hotel in Kailua Kona (the town is sometimes called that, but also Kailua, Kona, Kona Town, and Kailua town.  Like "Waimea" there's lots of Konas in Hawai'i (or is it lots of Kailua's?), but that kind of thing is to be expected when your alphabet only has 12 letters.)  Our hotel is on a teeny, tiny little beach that it shares with a super high-priced stand up paddle board rental shack on one side, and on the other, the restored personal heaiu, or temple, of Kamehameha himself, which is part of a national historical park.  The ancient Hawaiians weren't much for building great buildings---the temple is a modest lava rock and thatched roof affair built out into the small harbor on a rock platform, which you're prohibited from setting foot on.  Actually, the ancient Hawaiians aren't even that "ancient."  The first wave of intrepid explorers discovered this remotest of islands after sailing out of probably Micronesia in their canoes around 500 AD--an insane tale of ingenuity and bravery beyond the ken of this pitiable blog.  Anyway, those first people kept it real here for about 500 years or so, but were eventually were subdued and chased into the hills by the ancestors of today's Hawaiians who landed here around the year 1000.  All of the kings we know about, like Kamehameha, whose fame originates from being the first ali'i to unite (i.e., conquer) all of the islands, are mostly those living throughout the 19th century. Kamehameha's personal history overlaps that of the State of Illinois, to give you some perspective.

The hotel, as I was saying, was probably some big deal forty years ago, and today remains a perfectly respectable middle class draw.  It's got a nice beach-side pool and a pool bar with cheap (for Hawai'i) drinks.  We can't figure out how to keep the air conditioning off full blast in our room, but besides that, there is literally nothing not to like here.

View from our balcony...er..."lanai"

View of the pool and pool bar

On the first full day, we went right to it at Hapuna beach, which Conde Nast has in the past rated the best beach in America.  It's about a 30 minute drive north of the hotel.  The beach has all of the fixins: white sand, sandy bottoms, body-surfing appropriate sized waves, a snack bar (sans booze--so maybe not all the fixins), and to top it all off, just killer snorkeling right off the sand (we saw two turtles!)  It's nice to be able to do quality snorkeling without paying some local pirate an exorbitant excursion fee.  We've already had three great snorkeling sessions.  Here's a picture from the beach:

Hapuna Beach!

The Big Island has a bit of an unfair reputation for not having any good beaches.  It's understandable that, on an island as big as the other 6 islands put together, people expect more of the classically desirable beach than is here, but that is because of Hawai'i's very interesting geographical history.  You see, this island is among the very, very few places on earth still be made, as it were.  By the minute, this island is growing--these millennia it's the south flank that's getting bigger--thanks to the amazing power of the Hawaiian volcanic hotspot, the magma pipe underneath the island responsible over 85 million years for an archipelago of islands, atolls, and seamounts that stretch for 3,600 miles out toward Russia (the magma keeps flowing upwards from the Earth's core, but the plate on top of it moves, hence the string of islands left in the wake of the action).  Since the Big Island is the newcomer of the lot, it's still covered in (relatively) fresh lava flows.  Beaches, as we normally think of them, are deposits of tiny bits of coral and shell ground over eons into fine power by the churning of the ocean, and many of places on the Big Island would surely feature such beaches were it not for the volcanoes' annoying tendency to cover them over with lava (there are some black--and even a few green sand--beaches here, but who wants to sit on a hot black lava sand beach all day?)  Still, there are a few great beaches on this island, if one knows where to look for them (guidebooks, the internet), and we found 'em. 

After Hapuna, we drove back to the hotel, cleaned up, and headed out on Ali'i Drive--Kona's bay side tourist strip--for preprandials and dinner at Quinn's Almost-by-the-Sea, a refreshingly honest bar and grill acoss from our hotel that just serves up fresh caught Ono and Mahi Mahi without a ton of fuss.  Good choice, us!

Ok, more on beaches and food later.  In fact, this post is getting long, so I'll post this and hit the hay.