Big Island circle tour

Today we started with breakfast at the 808 Grindz, a small little place with decent food for decent price. We sat outside on wobbly chairs and table, you order at a window inside and they bring the food out to you. It was a very small place but the food and coffee were pretty good after breakfast we started on our circle tour of the Big Island, this is an all day trip.

We stopped at a lot of really good lookouts, the best may have been Waipio valley, which gives a really good view of big deep valley and the coastline. We also met a little cat friend that was hanging out there. During our all day drive we passed through several small towns and saw some beautiful waterfalls, the nicest of which was the Ak Ak Ak falls. We also stopped at another statue of King Kamehameha, there seems to be a lot of these on the different islands. I guess he was kind of a big deal, having united the islands and all that.

Since there was so much to see and this is a pretty big island we were kind of pressed for time as we got towards the end. So we stopped at a restaurant in Hilo called Jackie Reys Ohana Grill and ordered food to go and ate while we drove the “Hilo Loop” of the GuideAlong tour. That was pretty good food and did the job for dinner. After we grabbed dinner we stopped at Rainbow Falls and the Kaumana Caves lava tube, among other places. I guess you can walk pretty far into the lava tube, it's actually 25 miles long. But we just walked into the entrance and looked around a little bit as we would have needed a headlight or at least a good flashlight to walk any farther. As we continued driving around the south part of the island we noticed how much the landscape changed from one area to the other. We basically went through almost every type of landscape you could imagine other than a glacier. It was a pretty interesting drive. Needless to say we were pretty wiped out by the time we get back to our hotel in Kona.