Back to the trip! We left off at New Year's Eve, a day which was jam packed with activities, as this was the day we drove around the Big Island. We packed up the van with snacks, supplies, swim suits, and for Maya and I our party wear, and hit the road. We headed north, up over the top of the island, then over to the east side where we stopped to look at some waterfalls on our way in to Hilo.
The four of us wandered off to check out some path in the trees and we discovered a bunch of big banyan trees that we could climb into and onto. Pat and I were quick to run inside of one to hide from smoke monsters and polar bears, which everyone knows are quite problematic in Hawaii.
While the boys continued to play around in the trees, Maya and I headed off to explore some more of the paths and ended up at a lagoon, which I'm pretty sure did not contain any sexy sexy mermaids. Oh well!
Once the parents found us, we headed back into Hilo to have lunch at a place recommended in my guide book: Ken's House of Pancakes! It was everything you could hope for in an American diner. The menu was massive and had all sorts of bizarre choices, the decor was tacky and plentiful, the coffee was non-stop, and the waitress was very ... orange. For no other reason than because I could, I ordered the banana macadamia nut waffles with a side of vegetarian bacon.
After lunch we made our way to the volcano. Now, I'm not sure what they put in the food at Ken's House of Pancakes, but Pat, John and I had a serious case of the sillies after we left there. It all started with John announcing he had torn his shorts while climbing trees, which would not have happened if he'd had proper shorts on. This inspired Pat to start singing, to the tune of the Bare Naked Ladies song 'If I Had A Million Dollars', "If I had proper shorts on..." And once this started, it seemed pretty much impossible to stop. Pretty soon I had joined in, though mostly I was just laughing hysterically, especially whenever Maya would roll her eyes and shake her head at us. It went on for a long time. I have video footage, and it still puts me in hysterics. Especially the one where John starts singing in his Volcano Voice. Allow me to share!
I'm sure John is not happy with me for putting that online. Just be glad I didn't upload it to YouTube bud!
We made a visit to the Volcano National Park where we got some important information, watched an informative movie, and I purchased an educational coloring book. We decided to go on a walk through a lava tube. The first part of it was lit, and then there was an additional part that you could go on, if you had a flashlight. So the parents purchased one tiny little flashlight so we could further explore the lava tube. So, a pitch black cave, 6 people, 1 small flashlight. Chaos quickly ensued. At first the boys had the flashlight up the front, leaving everyone behind them in the dark. Perhaps it was a sugar crash, but they were pretty grumpy about the 4 of us behind them not being able to see anything, and everyone's patience was wearing thin. Reluctantly they agreed to pass the flashlight back so the person in the back could shine it forward, enabling everyone to see and no one to bitch at them to shine it back. I don't really have anything much to say about the actual lava tube, aside from that I was glad to get out of it and be done with the squabbling.
We then took a little hike along the volcano crater, but not the erupty part, which looked down into an old lava field. It was an overcast, rainy day so the view wasn't great. But most days up in the mountains are rainy and overcast, so I didn't exactly feel cheated by this. We wanted to go check out the actual lava flow, but this would have added an additional 3 hours of driving to our trip, plus however much time we spent at the lava. So after a bit of groaning and moping, we decided to head up to the museum where at sunset you could watch the volcano steam change from white to orange and red. The only problem was that we were a couple hours early for sunset, and we still had several hours worth of driving to do.
Eventually we settled on hitting the road again and heading into Kona for the New Year's Eve festivities. Everyone had made their way into the van except Maya, who had popped back into the museum, so I stuck around to let her know we were heading off. But it wasn't long before I went off mission! Instead of herding Maya into the car, I got distracted by the potential for an awesome novelty picture.
When Pat got sent out to heard us into the car, he also got sucked in to the novelty picture fun. Once we were finally all back in the van, we set off for Kona. I was sitting in the back with John, who had eaten half a bag of dried fruit. Needless to say, it was not smelling so good back there!
Once we got into Kona, Maya and I found a place to change and got ourselves glamorous for the night. Then we all headed for dinner at a little Italian place that had live music. We were all in the mood for some singing, so Pat found out what our karaoke options were, and after dinner we went in search of the karaoke bar. Now, I am not going to go into the details of what happened that night because those details are best left between myself and my siblings. Let's just say that much fun was had hanging out with the, as dad called them, local riff raff.
All in all, it was a pretty awesome way to wrap up 2010! And our taxi driver's accent was possibly the funnest way to start 2011.
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