Luau

On Friday night we had reservations for the Royal Kona Hotel’s Voyagers of the Pacific Luau.  Most of the luau's that we looked at seem to have a lot in common: Polynesian dancing that tells a story, fire-knife dancing, Hawaiian and island food from an all you can eat buffet, and an amazing location with sunset. We chose this particular one because reviews seem to indicate it might be a little more kid friendly, it was close to our hotel (on our second day on the island jet lag might be catching up with us) and since each hotel's luaus are only offered certain days of the week, this one matched up with our schedule.  Before we arrived, Sofia couldn't help noticing that are that the hotel where the luau was being held looked like a cruise ship.

The jet lag was starting to kick in.  It looked like Sofia was going to fall asleep in the car.  She got her second wind as soon as we sat down and they brought her a kid-friendly adult drink.  Can't remember what it was called. Some kind of sunrise. 

We had a private table really close to the stage and the setting was truly amazing right on the ocean with waves crashing on the rocks in the background and the sun setting as the backdrop.

This particular luau, through dance, told stories of how the Polynesians set out to discover the islands of the Pacific.  Food was really good, The entertainment absolutely kept our attention and kept Sofia interested. The servers were amazing.  The food area was kept clean and well stocked and our server seemed to be running back and forth constantly bringing us fresh drinks or bottles of water.  It was a great evening! 

Big Island Day 1

 After getting to the hotel last night at about 9 PM local time, or 3 AM our time, we took a quick shower and hit the bed thinking we would sleep pretty well.  At 2 AM local time, our bodies said it was time to wake up.  The unfortunate thing is that nothing in town was open at that time, nor would anything be open for  a few hours.  This gave us some time to research some other things we might want to do on the trip, as well as reading various restaurant menus for breakfast.  After some showers and about 4 hours, Walmart opened up.  We were there right after opening at 6 and we were able to stock up on some food for the week.  We were also able to kill some time before the restaurant we wanted to eat at opened at 7.

We chose Island Lava Java mostly for the large delicious looking cinnamon rolls.  They did not disappoint and we were fortunate that the restaurant had a nice view of the water and some other amazing food for breakfast.  We ended up sharing a couple of plates, the LUAU scramble, which is scrambled egg with slow roasted kalua pork, grilled pineapple, onion, cheddar & jack cheese; as well as the Island Style pancakes, which is sliced bananas & island-grown macadamia nuts on top of buttermilk 'cakes served with an amazing coconut syrup.

Since our bodies said it was already 1 PM, we opted for a couple of drinks with breakfast.  Chris had the Hibiscus lemonade (House-made hibiscus lemonade spiked with New Amsterdam Gin) and Jackie had the Hana Hou (Ocean vodka, guava puree, fresh orange, pineapple & lime juices).  

While we were awake for 4 hours this morning, we  had some additional time to research other things we might want to do on the trip which had been previously unplanned.  We stumbled across a "things to do around town" article someplace and learned that we could learn how to make leis for $10 each, which seemed like a bargain, and even better, it was right in our hotel!  After breakfast, we headed back for our 9:30 appointment.  There were just 3 other people learning to make leis with us.  Besides making our own leis we learned the history of the lei, its uses, when not to use, and some meanings behind different leis.  

After going back to the room for a few minutes, we headed out to one of our previously planned activities, visiting a seahorse farm.  The farm was located in an industrial type area near the airport, and if you were not looking for it, you would never know it is there.  Our tour lasted about an hour and apparently others knew about it too, because there were maybe a dozen others on the tour. We learned quite a bit about these little creatures.  The males give birth and usually get pregnant minutes after giving birth, which means they are pretty much pregnant their whole lives.  Seahorses are on the edge of extinction, in the wild only 1 in 1000 lives to be a year old.  They love shrimp.  And we got to hold and feed the seahorses, which was really cool. 

Above:  seahorse food (shrimp)

Above: just tried eating seaweed for the first time!

Hawaii Big Island

We were talking the other day and we realized that it's been nearly 10 years since we last updated our travel blog.

We think the reason we stopped is because it was becoming cumbersome and time consuming to carry our laptop around, transfer digital photos from our camera to the laptop, and type out our words for the blog each night. 

But that was 10 years ago. Since then, the app has gotten a little better for the blog, our cell phone cameras have gotten far better producing high quality photos, and just talking to her phone has made things easier eliminating the need to type stuff out. 

So we decided we would try it out again.  We don't even know if anybody's even following this anymore. I guess we will find out! 

Obviously in our last 10 years our travel patterns have changed a little bit.  While we still travel quite a bit, we now have a small travel partner and the types of places we go to have changed somewhat.

For our latest trip, we took advantage of Sofia's spring break in March to take a trip to Hawaii.  We knew that if we didn't want to pull her out of school we would have a relatively short amount of time for the trip.  We ended up pulling her out of school for just one day but between the many snow days we had this year and the days lost due to Helene, they ended up making one of her prior scheduled vacation days a school day in order to make up time.  Because of this we had to pull her out of school for 2 days.

We also decided to focus our entire trip on only the Big Island of Hawaii.  We did this because with only about 8 days we did not want to spend partial days at the airport transferring to the next island. That would have to be another trip.

We started our trip in Charlotte rather than Asheville for two reasons.  First, starting in Asheville would require two changes of planes, plus flying out of Charlotte is typically a lot cheaper.  Charlotte airport is under 2 hours from our house so we thought this was worth it.  Our flight out of Charlotte was delayed and we landed in Los Angeles about an hour later than we were supposed to.  Of course, our flight out of Los Angeles was delayed as well. Our 2-hour layover over turned into a 3-hour layover.  By the time we got to the Kona airport in Hawaii, we had been traveling over 15 hours. 

Despite being long, the trip wasn't all that bad.  While we were waiting in Charlotte, a flight attendant stopped to give Sofia some wings.  We thought that was pretty cool and it allowed her to add to her collection!

We also brought some gifts for the crew on the plane as we typically do.  This time it paid off in terms of free cheese plate on the plane and  letting Sofia sit in the cockpit.

When we arrived in Hawaii we were treated to a lunar eclipse as we got off the plane. 

We had also pre-arranged for a lei greeting for the family.  Sofia was really surprised by this and surprisingly that we are the only ones it seemed in the whole airport who had signed up for this.

Day 3 of Labor Day trip

The next day we would not venture more than 40 miles from our hotel but we still managed to have a full day, not getting back until just about dark.  After breakfast we headed towards Mt. Rushmore, trying to beat the crowds.  We knew the place must get really filled up based on the fact that they have two - five story parking garages.  We don't think we've ever been to a National Park with a parking garage.  Besides the parking garages we were immediately greeted by a Mt. Rushmore soda machine.  We thought that was a nice touch but it didn't make us any thirstier. 

We did manage to beat the worst of the crowds but there were still quite a few people there.  We actually rented an audio tour guide so we could get the story behind some of what we were seeing. The last time we were here, maybe ten years ago, it was raining and we were pretty much in and out. This time the weather was beautiful.  We took the time to get a closer look at monument by walking the Presidential Trail which is a loop trail that gets you up closer to the base of the mountain.  We noticed that the majority of the visitors to the monument do not do this and stay back near the entrance.  We were able to get some unique shots of the monument by taking this extra little walk.

 

Some of the crowds we were able to avoid

After Rushmore we headed to Crazy Horse Memorial.  Crazy Horse Memorial is a memorial slowly being carved out of the mountain.  When completed it will be depict Crazy Horse, an Oglala Lakota warrior, riding a horse and pointing into the distance. The memorial has been under construction since 1948 and is being built using only private funds.  When complete the final dimensions will be 641 feet wide and 563 feet high. By comparison, the heads of the four U.S. Presidents at Mount Rushmore are each 60 feet high.  The monument has been in progress since 1948 and is far from completion.  We had visited about 10 years ago and we do not remember much difference in what we saw then and what we saw now but we will have to look at pictures when we get home.  We decided that we will likely probably not live to see the completion of the monument.

What the completed monument should look like..some day.

After leaving Crazy Horse we started making our way around the park, ultimately heading to the Wildlife loop and the Iron Mountain Road.  Our route took us on the Needles Highway, which in many places we had no idea how they cut it out of the rock.  There are several places where there is only a very narrowly cut tunnel tall enough maybe for a small box truck at most and not much wider than a single car.  We were really in no hurry and we gladly took our time enjoying the scenery.  We also pulled off the main road for a quick side trip up Coolidge Mountain which gave us some beautiful views of the surrounding parks and Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse far off in the distance.

Our next stop was the wildlife loop, which is simply a looping drive around Custer State Park where there is known to be good chances of wildlife sightings.  We had hoped to see buffalo and for a long time we didn't see any.  Instead we saw more prairie dogs, tons of pronghorn deer, and a bunch of burros, or what we called begging donkeys.  The burros are actually decedents of the herd of burros that used to carry visitors up to the top of one of the mountains.  The rides were discontinued and the burros were released into the park and today their descendants are a popular attraction.  Today they pretty much beg every passing car for food.  We were prepared with apples which they happily gobbled up. Once our apples were gone it was pretty hard to get the donkeys away from the car, they just wanted more. We drove down just about every side dirt road looking for animals and besides the deer we only got some really nice scenery.  Finally, after a few miles we stopped at a ranger station to inquire about where the buffalo might be and the woman inside told us to keep going, about 5 miles up the road they'd be everywhere.  So we headed up the road and sure enough, we ran into quite a few buffalo.  They were walking right down the road towards our car (and other cars) creating something of a traffic jam.  These animals are quite huge and very much intimidating.  Even though we were in our mini-van we still did not feel completely safe, almost as if they could charge our car and do some serious damage if they only chose to.  We later learned that when settlers first started moving west there were millions of buffalo and the scene was described as "the plains were black and appeared to be in motion"; there were that many buffalo! 

Pretty drive...we had the place to ourselves

After our buffalo fix we started making our way back to Rapid City.  We chose to take the Iron Mountain Road back towards Mt. Rushmore.  Definitely not a shortcut, the road is famous for its scenic, one-lane tunnels aligned to frame the faces on Mount Rushmore and its looping "pigtail bridges" where the road passes under itself as it twists down the mountain.  The tunnels were really cool as they were built to intentionally give the traveler a view of Rushmore as you exited the tunnel.  We stopped at a few places along the way for pictures and to stretch our legs before making our final push towards the hotel back in Rapid City.