Saturday and Sunday- Taking It Easy Island Style
Trip Start
Jul 22, 2009
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3
Trip End
Jul 27, 2009
Volcano, Hawaii
Sunday, July 26, 2009
We vegged around Saturday morning until 9:30 when we connected to the church service back home online. Transmission was good other than a hiccup and and there. After that, we eventually showered up and got ready to go down the mountain to Hilo for our first Ken's House of Pancakes visit. I ordered vegetarian eggs benedict/pancakes/rice and Becca had Korean Beef/mac salad/fries. Service was great and food was better :)
After Ken's, we headed to the Pahoa area to relive some of the memories from the last part of our honeymoon. It took about 30 minutes and several wrong turns, but we eventually found our way to Chuck and Mary Smith's house where we stayed 8 nights on our honeymoon. The house looked great, and is now for sale. Even with about 3 hours of daylight left, we could hear the Coqui frogs beginning to chirp *shivers*
From Pahoa, we made our way up Saddle Road between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. There wasn't much cloud cover, so we could see the summit of Mauna Kea. I haven't uploaded the pictures yet as I write this, but I think we'll include a picture we took of Mauna Kea from Saddle Road.
We ended up at the Mauna Kea visitors' center at 6pm and waited for the sky to get dark. Stargazing was real nice- no clouds. However, there were a lot of people up there, many were annoying. We found a nice quiet spot where we could lay on a picnic table and look up at the sky in peace and quite. We could make out an "arm" of the Milky Way, saw several shooting stars/satellites, and maybe a pulsar? We also got to see excellent views of the crescent moon and Saturn through high-power telescopes. Anyway, our peace and quiet at the picnic table lasted for about five minutes until a loud/obnoxious family came over to our area and annoyed us. After about 30 minutes of good stargazing, we decided to leave.
Sunday (today) was extremely slow-paced. We basically enjoyed the cabin, went down the mountain for Ken's, and came back up and relaxed in the cabin.
May try to get some beach time in tomorrow before we get on a plane and head back. Probably won't be enough for a blog entry.
Overall a nice, relaxing trip. Aloha!
