| We arrived in Honolulu around Noon, Monday, March 6. We had left Bradley Field in Hartford, Connecticut at around 6:30 PM, the day before with 4 overloaded suitcases, my laptop, my camera, Robin's overloaded carry-on, and two very disturbed cats. We stayed overnight in a hotel at LAX and continued our journey at 8:00 the next morning. When we left Massachusetts, the temperature was just above freezing for the first time in two weeks. The weather in Hawaii when we arrived was, well, you know! Actually, you don't know unless you've been here, there just isn't any way to describe it. The best I can do is to say that it's like that first wonderful warm spring day after a hard winter. Every day! |
| Clicking on maps will bring up a larger scale map in another window. |
| We stayed at Honolulu Airport for only a few hours, eating lunch, and then getting the cats from the quarantine station and hopping on a plane that took us to Hilo, on The Big Island, formally known as Hawai'i. We arrived at around 4:30 at the Hilo International Airport, which is something to see because it's mostly open-air. The baggage claim has only a roof and opens directly onto the road. Extremely cool! We were juggling so many things, I never got to take any pictures! We picked up our rental car, a Jeep Wrangler, and headed off to our lodgings, Hawaiian Paradise Inn, which it was not. |
| This was the place we first stayed: Hawaiian Paradise Inn. We booked it sight-unseen for a month from something Robin found on the internet and was the cheapest we could find. The pictures were much better than it actually was. No big surprise, but... |
| These images look pretty good because the sun is shining, not like it was for the first two weeks when it was raining all the time. It is just a little add-on shed with clay tile on a concrete floor. As you can see, the jalousie windows were opaque and so you couldn't see out of them. The view on the back side was of a junk pile beside the house you see looming in the background so not being able to see out that side wasn't a problem. But having no windows to see out of made the place dark and claustrophobic. It was barely wide enough to fit an uncomfortable full-sized bed with barely enough room to move around in. The bathroom was long and narrow with a shower that leaked on the floor and a toilet that required 6-10 flushes to fully flush. Mix that all in with a smelly kitty litter box and it has heaven on earth! Welcome to Paradise! I think one of the reasons we did so much exploring was to avoid having to be in the place! |
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| Our first mission was to become familiar with the island and to look at some of the properties that Robin had been researching on the Internet for the last 6 months. This research led to us choosing the Puna area (as shown) as a potential place that we'd like to live, which influenced where we rented our temporary living place in Pahoa. Our first tour was to check out Waa Waa. We left Hawaiian Paradise Inn in Pahoa and headed down along the Kapoho Rd. (left image, white line southeast from Pahoa) to Kapoho, where we took a left onto the "Red Road" that went along the coast toward Hawaiian Beaches. From there, we went back to the main road and headed up into Hilo to Ken's Pancake House, a local institution, for brunch. |
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| I thought this was pretty interesting. Note the sign. In the photo to the right, you can see the back of the sign, top left. If waves are to break on the ledge, they must be pretty big waves. This is what we were seeing at the time. I took so many pictures of this coastline, I haven't a clue as to which ones to include here. The coastline was extremely rocky and the waves were POUNDING the shore. Any haziness you see is not poor photography - it's the spray and mist in the air from the waves breaking on the rocks. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it! |
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| Our first view of Hawaii. Honolulu International Airport on Oahu |
| I was quite taken with the view outside Honolulu Airport |
This is the road to Waa Waa. We both were blown away by the lush vegetation overhanging the road
- it was like driving down a exotic green tunnel. We kept stopping and taking pictures - although many
more could be taken, but we just couldn't keep climbing in and out of the Jeep or we never would
have seen the rest of the island and we were just starting.
- it was like driving down a exotic green tunnel. We kept stopping and taking pictures - although many
more could be taken, but we just couldn't keep climbing in and out of the Jeep or we never would
have seen the rest of the island and we were just starting.
Photos 1, Page 1
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| March 7, 2006 |
Waa Waa
| Monday, March 6, 2006 |
First impressions
| Tuesday, March 7, 2006 |
Day 1, The Big Island
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