Wednesday, December 14, 2016

Travels with Our Grandkids II (b) – Hawaii, the Big Island


Here we are arriving at Kona, our second port, on the Big Island of Hawaii. Kona doesn’t have docking facilities for large cruise ships so it’s necessary to go ashore in tenders (actually a couple of our ship’s lifeboats).
As luck would have it we disembarked just as hundreds of lean and lanky athletes dashed into the water on the first leg of an Ironman triathlon – a 2.4 mile swim in Kailua-Kona Bay (to be followed by a 112 mile bike ride across the Hawaiian lava dessert and a marathon run along the coast).  It wasn’t the famous Kona Ironman World Championship, which is held in the fall, but they all looked like champions to us.


Also on the Big Island, we toured the previously mentioned lava beds, including walking through a huge lava tube in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and Danny even agreed to participate in a precipitous hike through a spectacular botanical garden… on condition that I go for a very scary bike-ride on our second last day… or maybe I agreed to go on the bike-ride only on condition that he see the garden.