Hawai'i Work Trip Day 6 (Thursday)
Thursday we were pretty tired, especially after all the long day on the bus on Wednesday. So we took it a bit easier.
We realized we really needed to spend our food money, so we had breakfast at the hotel restaurant again. Miraculously, my dad ordered pineapple french toast, even though pineapples are "poison."
It was going to be our last day at that hotel (work got us a special day for 3 extra days, but were there for 4 extra, so for the last night we were staying elsewhere), so we went and watched the baby hammerhead shark in the pond behind the hotel for a while.
Baby hammerhead shark.
We then decided to drive up to the north western part of the island, since we hadn't been there. We drove up to Lakapahi State Historical Park, which was a village site and had a tour showing the various houses and other buildings.
Then we drove up to the valley across from Waipi'o valley, where'd been on Monday. We didn't bother hiking down, though.
Looking back up the valley.
Looking down at the beach from the overlook.
We drove back up across Kohala, the oldest of the five volcanoes that make up the island. There were some pretty incredible views back down across the island:
Looking forward towards Mauna Loa. We could see the observatories up there.
Panorama looking down from the overlook. It's harder to tell in a photo how far away the shore was.
On the way back, I thought we should get shaved ice at least once, since I had fond memories of it from my conference trip to Oahu in 2015, and we were going to be going almost right past the shop that was supposedly the best on the Big Island (although, the Big Island isn't really known for it...). Although the line wasn't that long, it took something like 5 minutes for each person to get through, and if I had known it was going to take an hour, I would have skipped it. And the shaved ice wasn't as good as what I'd had in Honolulu either. Oh well.
After that we went back to the hotel, and I wanted to try snorkeling, especially since we had free access to snorkels there. I'd never done it before and wasn't really sure what I was doing, and at first I kept panicking -- not being able to breathe through my nose bothered me. But eventually I did get the hang of it, and I went out and saw a lot of really brightly colored fish and some really big ones. I wish I could have taken photos because it was pretty incredible.
I also saw a huge sea turtle from very close. And then I told the people who had been bothering it that we were supposed to stay 20 feet away and not harass them.
After that we went to have dinner at the same restaurant as the other night (using up our food credits again). I had more sushi, because why not. And that was about it for the day. I had been hoping to see the stars one more time, but it was cloudy, so it was not to be.