Hawaii Day 4: Kona

On Wednesday morning we packed up to move to our second condo of the week, in Sunny Kona. We spent the morning exploring the Black Sand Beach near our condo, and saw lots of turtles in the water poking their heads above the surface. We climbed a hill near the beach and found an old church made of stones that overlooked the ocean with a small cemetery behind. Before we left we swam in the pool and soaked in the hot tub, since we hadn't had time or energy our whole stay so far.

Our drive posed a dilemma-- I had purchased enough food for dinner to last us the whole week, which included raw chicken breast that already sat in the car almost three hours on our drive to this condo and Kona was a two hour drive, with check in at the new condo not until 4pm. In the end, the chicken had to be sacrificed.

We stopped first at a state park which at one time had a long dock we speculated was for shipping items to this side of the island, but had obviously been destroyed in the harsh surf long ago.

Back on the road we were zipping along listening to Hawaiian music when we saw a police car on the other side of the road flash his lights at us. We pulled over and learned we were going 50mph in a 35 zone. The policeman was kind of flummoxed when we asked if we could take his picture-- but we assured him it was just part of our vacation experience.

We stopped at an organic fruit stand mentioned by our guide book, where all the fruit was grown on site and the stand looked out over the ocean. The girl that sold us the Guanabanana (the big green one in the picture above) we bought (also known as sour sop) was very zen-- I would be too if I worked there.

Next was another place for snorkeling (I can't find the guidebook right now to tell you what it is called but when I do I'll let you know). We saw lots of dolphins far out in the surf (a bit far to snorkel to). The snorkeling was good there, although after about an hour in the water, which had a fair amount of current, I started getting seasick. When we tried to get out of the water the waves pushed me into the rocks and I got kind of scraped up.

Our next stop was a store called "Donkey Balls" which sells famed chocolate covered macademia nuts and as it turned out, lots of other chocolate covered things. Unfortunately even the dark chocolate products had milk fat in them-- the only thing in the store I found without dairy was chocolate covered strawberries, which we bought even though they had horrors such as high fructose corn syrup in them (they were way too sweet, I ended up eating very little of it anyway.) The woman who sold them to us told us that it rains in Kona every day at 3pm-- you can almost set your watch by it-- we stored this tidbit away for planning our next few days.

We did a few errands in town, taking another trip to the health food store, going to Costco to return the salad mix I'd bought which went bad in a couple days.

When we arrived at our condo in Kona we were enchanted-- we had what we deemed the best view in the entire place, on the corner overlooking both the pool and the ocean. We had a relaxing dinner on the lanai, watched the sunset, soaked in the hot tub and went to bed early.