Waipio Valley

I do believe our visit to Waipio Valley was the first of multiple confirmations that I sweat way more than Dave.  I'm a sweaty sweaterton.  We went against my mom's advice to NOT hike down to this black sand beach.  She told me, "I'm warning you, don't do it.  It's one mile down and ten miles up."  Well.  Indeed, it was super steep, but we were expecting it because she told us so it was actually a lot of fun.  I like sweating when I'm working for it!

This is the lookout point with the black sand beach below:

You can see a waterfall coming down the cliff:

We decided the view was great, but we wanted to go check it out up close and personal.

So we're walkin' along, walkin' along...

...taking in the sites-- looking at the cool flowers...

Oooo, look!  The leaves have those cool holes!

Neato!

And then I saw a gnarly looking spider:

I took a few pictures of it, but had too many heebie jeebies to carry on so Dave took almost all of these awesome spider pictures you are about to behold.

If you follow the barrel of the lens you can see the spider/it's size.  I'm not saying it's an enormous tarantula.  I'm just saying we saw a gnarly looking spider and took a bunch of pictures of it because we like pictures and think they are cool and fun to have.

I like the little guy at the top in this one!

Take a good look at these if you can-- you can see some amazing stuff, including the silk coming out of the spider!

All of those are so cool, but they literally make me shudder.

Moving on down the road:

Hawaii is incredible.  There is so much variety of terrain and scenery!  Black and volcanic, green and mossy, snowy and frozen, hilly, different kinds of trees and on and on.  It's so cool.

Too bad this picture is out of focus-- this tree is crazy cool!  This was a swampy part of our trek and there were mosquitoes galore, so it was a quick snap and run.  Aw, snap.  Don't hate.  (Remind me to tell you the story of  "Aw, snap" and "Don't hate" someday.)

We made it!  Going down was nothing.  It was just steep and a little slippery from a little bit of rain and I was sweaty because I sweat a lot.

Black sand.

Sexy people, everywhere!

Pictures really don't do this justice-- the vegetation covered cliffs shooting straight up, way up, and a little forest of sorts before you got to the rocks and then the beach.  It was cool.

This picture also does not do justice to just how steep our hike up was.

It rained on us just about the whole way up so we were nice and wet!  It was totally fun and a good memory maker!

Mauna Kea

Our first adventure in Hawaii was the Mauna Kea Observatory.  It was FREEZING up there!  I don't know how cold it really was, but man, it felt incredibly cold and I just had a wimpy hoodie.  It's the highest point in Hawaii at 13,803 ft.  On the way up, we passed pick up truck after pick up truck with their beds totally full of snow.  I have no earthly idea what they do with it, but it was quite popular!  We took in the top-of-the-world views, caught the sunset and stayed for the stars.  Very cool and very cold.  

Almost all the pictures are from the same vantage point because there was a bunch of photographers set up on tripods, so we got our spot and stayed in it.  I wussed out and sat in the car for a while every now and again.  It was so cold!  So Dave took a lot of these pictures.

Dave, super cold.

It was a bit too cloudy for the sunset to be awesome.  That was kind of a bummer, but it was still beautiful.

That's snow blowing.

We tried to set up the tripod for some stars in the cold and dark... waaaaay better than the last time we tried.  

Also, by the way, the first things we noticed when we got to Hawaii at like 11pm were:

-The sky was clear and you could actually see stars!

-It wasn't flat!

-The roads were smooth!

Those are things you can only truly appreciate if you live in Houston where you never see stars, it's totally flat and the roads are like a roller coaster with pot holes galore.  Looooove it.