Hawai'i Day 5

Some residents of Kalapana insist on staying around.

Jess finds the door she wants on our next house.

Definitely suffering from the sunburns today. We didn't really realize that our backs were getting toasted when we were snorkeling, because we HAD lathered on the sunblock. Alas, we spent the morning checking out the gift shops. We kept trying to get over to Walmart yesterday, but the police had the whole place cordoned off. We finally got in today and I guess there had been a bomb threat there.

Next we headed out across to top of Hawai'i and on over to Hilo. We got into the lava viewing area a little after dark and hiked out to the ocean where we had a pretty good view of the lava, but taking pictures there was next to impossible as you can see. It was breathtaking to watch the lava pour into the ocean, the waves beating up against the molten rock and dissolving instantly into steam.

On the way back we drove the nearly impassible Saddle Road. It was completely dark and the stars were like nothing I've ever seen before. When we got back I started reading in our guidebook and discovered that only crazy people drive the Saddle Road at night, so there you have it.