Back home

Steve and the kids went for a final swim in the morning, leaving Rachel with some space to finish the packing. Luckily everything went back in! We had to checkout at 12 and didn't need to be at the airport until 3 so we stopped at an Outlet Mall and had a final dinner and did a bit of shopping. We made it safely to the airport and through into the departure lounge, where we all had nice refreshing Frappucinos!

We had a nice 777 home with a good entertainment system, though Isobel was torn as Brave was available but we'd promised to take her to see it on Sunday. In the end she watched some of it as a taster! The drive home was uneventful and we got back about 3 PM, all fairly tired!

As a footnote, the blog allows you to see stats of page views. As expected we saw a lot from the UK and France, plus the US as we looked ourselves, but we also seem to have picked up a big following in Russia, with  67 page views over the 3 weeks, plus a few in Germany and South Korea. I wonder what they were searching for to find it!

Anyway, that's it for now. See you all soon and we have a lot more photos and videos to bore you with. :)

Disneyland afternoon and baseball

Such was the shortness of the queues we'd been on pretty much everything we wanted to go on by 4 PM just in time to catch the parade. We managed to get a good spot to view it, but it was in the sun and getting very warm by this time.

We also went on the Indiana Jones ride which we hadn't been too before, which was excellent if a little bone shaking.

After a short refresh in the room we jumped into the car to drive the couple of miles to the LA Angels of Anaheim stadium to see our final treat of the holiday, a baseball game.

Isobel wasn't too bothered apart from the free food in our package but Sam really got into the spirit of things and made friends with a couple of kids sitting behind us, including some rather ambitious flirting with the girl who was probably about 16. He enjoyed being somewhere where shouting, screaming and being annoying are endearing American traits. The game ended up being a humdinger too, with the Angels coming from behind to win 6-5 against the Red Sox in the final innings.

Disneyland morning

Another early start, this time to go to Disneyland. It was really quiet, to the point where there wasn't any point getting fast passes, when you tried to use them the queues were so small they were after the fast pass entry points. It was another glorious sunny day too.

It was just as well it was sunny, as Rachel got soaked on Splash Mountain roughly 2 seconds after this photo was taken on the way down.

Isobel managed to see both Merida from Brave and Rapunzel, while Steve and Sam went on the new Star Tours updated ride. Lunch was a rather tasty pasta and salad (pizza for the kids).

Disney California Adventure afternoon

After a hot dog lunch we carried on around the park. It was pretty hot by now, hotter than we had expected, but everyone was well creamed up. We watched the live Aladdin stage show which was excellent, the Genie shoed in some very topical jokes including one about Prince Harry in Vegas. We didn't have to queue for more than about 15 minutes for any other ride and most of the fast passes were barely an hour ahead.

After dinner we watched the World of Color water and light show on the lake, a mixture of fountains and projections onto water screens. It was very magical and the Blackberry pics don't really do it justice I'm sure. As an added bonus we got to see the Disneyland fireworks as we walked home, all fairly tired!

Disneyland California Adventure morning

We were up and out early to walk over the road to the California Adventure park. We haven't been here before, last time we were here we just did Disneyland. They have just opened a Cars land area (after the film) which had made it more popular, in fact the first thing we did when we got in is got fast track tickets for the Radiator Springs Racers because it is very popular and the queues by midday were about 2 hours, which is insane. 

Luckily it meant the rest of the park was quieter. We got Sam to go on the California Screamin' roller coaster.

The Cars ride was good, a bit like Test Track in Florida. Other good rides were the River Rapids as it was very hot and nice to get wet, Goofy's Sky School was like the mighty mouse and Toy Story Midway Mania. We saw Jake and the NeverLand Pirates live on stage and came out just in time to see the Pixar parade.

Hollywood and Vine

As you may have seen on Facebook, we had to find Judy Garland's star on Hollywood Boulevard. As a bonus we also found her handprints at the Chinese Theater.

We were saved by a McDonalds when Rachel needed the loo, public toilets are hard to find in Hollywood! After this we drove down to Venice Beach. Unfortunately it was a sunny Summer Sunday and lots of other people had the same idea, so parking proved to be a challenge.

We headed back and went to Downtown Disney, where the kids looked around the stores and began to get very excited.

Swimming and driving

In the morning the kids went for a swim in the hotel pool while Rachel unpacked. It was a good pool for a relatively cheap hotel, with water fountains and things.

We drove off into LA, we had a day to do as many touristy things as we possibly could. The driving is always 'fun', sometimes you have as many as 8 lanes to chose from and the system thinks nothing of dropping you into the right hand lane and giving you 800 yards to get across 4 busy lanes to get where you want to go to.

We headed to Hollywood Boulevard, avoiding being towed away when a nice man warned us not to park in the opposite direction to the traffic flow at a parking meter.

Travel Day

Today was the day we left Hawaii, we had to be up early to drive to Hilo airport to check in for our first leg back to Honolulu. The departure lounge was the comfiest  we had ever been in mind you. We had a good view of Big Island as we took off, we saw the Akaka Falls and took a few pics on the little camera.

After a fairly tortuous queue to check in for our flight to Los Angeles the flight itself was fairly uneventful. About 5 hours, though with the 3 hour time difference it meant we didn't arrive until 9 PM. We picked up our hire car, a Dodge Avenger (pic to follow) and drove the 25 mile to Anaheim, though at least being 10 PM the LA freeways were flowing, though still unbelievably busy.

We checked into our hotel which is opposite Disneyland, we can see the Tower of Terror over the road. Although it was now 11 PM we hadn't had dinner as our bodies were still on Hawaii time. So we went and grabbed take away pizza and ate it in our room at midnight, before finally going to sleep.

Volcano!

Today we drove to the Volcano Natonal Park. We saw the massive main crater, which reerupted in 2008 blowing a big new hole which is still spewing clouds of sulphur and steam.

We then drive down the 20 mile chain of crater road, which passes a number of craters and lava fields that were created in the 60s and 70s.

The new volcano erupted in 1983and has been erupting ever since, though unfortunately the current active lava flow is in a fairly inaccessible place. 20 miles down the chain of crater road the lava flowed across and blocked the road in 2003. Apparently they spent $10 million dollars reopening it only for it to get covered up by a new flow 4 months later. At this point they gave up! In places the lava is over 100 foot deep and has added 500m to the coastline.

Waterfalls and Stars

We made the short journey to Akaka Falls, it wasn't far from our house, maybe only a couple of miles as the crow flies. Supposedly there is a waterfall 5 minutes walk from the house but we don't know which direction! The falls were very tall and dramatic.

The walk to them was fairly short but scenic, which the kids appreciated.

In the afternoon we drove back to the house and the children had a swim in the pool.

In the evening we drove an hour to the Mauna Kea observatory visitor centre, which is about 2 miles above sea level and was a considerably chilly 7 degrees. The peak of the mountain is another mile up and has a large number of observatories on it, but the children are not allowed up there because of the high altitude. The visitor centre had some interesting videos about space things that Sam enjoyed and a number of telescopes looking at interesting things. We saw Saturn, rings and all. You could see a lot of stars with the naked eye up there!

The middle of nowhere

We carried on down the coast road , lots of valleys and gulches on the way. We carried on into Hilo, the largest town on Big Island and also apparently the wettest town in the USA.  We found somewhere to have dinner and were ready to head back to find the house when we realised the directions were in an email and we didn't have Internet. We ended up sitting outside the Home Depot store using their free wi fi (which is where we are now doing the blog). I'm glad we did, because we'd never have found it otherwise. It was several miles off the main road, it was dark and raining and the last couple of hundred yards were down a flooding, overgrown dirt track. We were relived when we found it, though it was a bit dark and spooky when we arrived and there were lots of noisy animals in the trees!

In the morning in the light and sunshine it looked a lot more hospitable.

It also had a whirlpool bath which the kids enjoyed.

Into the Valley

Yesterday evening we'd checked our AMEX online to see if they'd taken the payment for our house in Volcano. We saw that the company had refunded our deposit on the 8th August, which was somewhat concerning. In the morning we rang the company and they said it was no longer available. Somewhere there had been a communication breakdown. Luckily they had another house available they gave us for the same price, the other side of Hilo. More on that later.

We drove down to the bay where Captain Cook was killed, there is a monument to him but it is across the bay and only accessible by foot or kayak. Steve did some snorkelling as there was an excellent reef. Due to the house being in a different place, we had to drive the other way around the Island to get to it, the north side. This was a lot different to the volcanic rock on the south side. It was more like Wales!

 The advantage of going this way around was it meant we could stop at the Waipio valley, an enormous valley over a mile wide and 7 miles long.

Pool and beans

The morning was hot and sunny so we went to the pool behind our building, we had it all to ourselves so we didn't have to worry about the kids being noisy.

After lunch we drove up into the hills to the Mountain Thunder coffee plantation  where it was considerably cooler and damper. We had a free 45 minute tour where they went through the whole process of preparing the coffee beans from harvesting the cherries from the trees to roasting, it was very interesting. Here are the beans fresh out if the roasting oven.

Later we had dinner at the apartment and watched the sun set over the sea and golf course. 

A sting in the tail

Sam and Steve were playing in the sea when Sam suddenly cried out he'd been stung. In typical Sam fashion he started panicking so Steve helped him out of the sea and up onto the beach where his crying drew a crowd. Someone pointed out that the lifeguards had just put up a sign warning that Portugese Man of War had been spotted offshore. Not very useful when you are in the sea already! Luckily a woman had some kind of sting spray and used that on his arms. We went to see the lifeguard and we weren't the only ones there, another guy and kid had been stung. He told Sam to go in the shower and it should subside after a few minutes. The shower helped with the pain, but he had nasty lines of welts on his back and arms. We never actually saw a Man of War, the lifeguard said it could have been a detached tenticle.

Luckily Sam didn't react too badly and within half an hour the swelling and redness had gone and he just had a faint line of marks. We drove back and later went out for a steak to cheer him up. He was soon better and talking about the incident like he'd taken on a crocodile single handed!

Lava, bread and sand

We headed North up the coast road, for nearly all of the journey either side of the road was just lava rock. Some of it was jagged and heaped, a bit like in Lanzarote, but in other places it was smooth and liquid like, obviously where it had flowed and cooled.

After about 50 minutes we came to Hapuna Bay, a nice beach resort with yellow sand, more unusual on Big Island than Oahu. Before heading down to the beach we had a picnic, Sal would have been proud!

We played in the surf, it was quite rough again which Sam likes.

Breakfast bonanza

Isobel prepared strawberry and banana smoothies for everyone (with a bit of assistance), which went down very well.

We the had the rest of our breakfast on the balcony, with the beautiful scenery around us and the sea in the background.

We then headed off out for the day, bellies full!