Hawaii2:

We boarded the boat Monday afternoon. It took a little bit of time to get all registered in, but it was relatively painless. Upon boarding, we took a little bit of time to look around and familiarize ourselves with the fun things the boat had to offer. Then we had our first work out session followed by an excellent hot tub session.

Later in the evening we enjoyed tapas for dinner and called it a day.

The next morning we arrived at Hilo, which is on the big island (it's name is Hawaii... but so is the state so they just call it the big island). We met my recently wed cousin and her husband and they took us on a personal tour of Hilo since they lived on the island. We got to see some Volcanic craters and walked on some lava rocks. Then we went to a black sand beach that was only 10 years old. It was just like a beach, but the sand was actually black! How weird and cool.

(again, blogger isn't letting me insert pictures... yet)

From there we visited the Mauna Loa macadamia nut factory. The tour was closed so we just went the gift shop and got free samples. Yum! After getting back to the boat, we went for another hot tub run. At this point I invented a little game for us. We developed this method deemed "The Asian Clog" where the point was to be the final jaccuzzi occupants. It worked like this: first one or two of us would jump into a moderately occupied hot tub. Then a couple more of us would trickle in, making our family's presence in the hot tub more overwhelming. As the other parties surrendered and left due to our sheer presence, additional family members would be called in to fill in the spots until finally the hot tub was claimed as ours. By the end of the trip, we had succeeded 4 times and had never been defeated.

We set sail that night and stayed close to the shore so that we could see some active volcanos spewing out lava and forming new land. It was really pretty and neat; right in front of my eyes I was watching a new part of Hawaii being formed.

The next day we arrive in Maui, and that'll be our next chapter...