Day 3......

Ah day 3 on the island, we knew that at some point we would have to drive around the whole island and we wanted to get it out of the way as early as possible. So day 3 was selected as the day on which we would tackle this daunting task, and i say daunting because unlike Kauai (the only other island that Jen and i have been to) where you can drive to either end of the island in about an hour and a half this was going to require over 3 hours of driving. Thats 3 hour just driving, no stopping, just drive on through, well you know me and im not about to do that. So our expedition took ALL DAY!! and we didnt even make it around the whole thing. It was really cool though as the Big Island is incredibly diverse, part of it your driving through barren lava rock desert and the next you feel like youre in the middle of montana and then youre driving through jungle.........really cool to experience. Really recommend doing that drive if you ever go to Hawaii, be forewarned though that you will miss A LOT! Even with us stopping at various places we missed a ton, theres just so much to see. Along the way we stopped at some wind farms (my wife does their taxes so she was excited to stop there) turned out to be a cool place to shoot, saw some water falls, stopped at the town of Hilo (kinda run down) ate some yummy food there, visited the volcano national park. The park was cool as you could overlook some of the craters and some were still steaming and people were walking on it, really cool to see. We almost did the hike to one of them but we were losing light fast and came ill prepared and had no flashlights. So we drove to the end of the road instead to see if we could see the currently active volcano dumping lava into the ocean. Alas it was not meant to be for as soon as we got there we discovered it was a 4 mile hike to get anywhere near it and that the better viewing was on the other side of the highway which was over an hour away in the opposite direction. So all that we saw was the plume of smoke, disappointed and tired we decided it was time to head home but planned to come back to see more. Overall it was a sweet day!!! Heres some photos........ill update this one again with more photos soon.