Easter Egg Hunting

For Elizabeth, this Easter was all about the hunting. As soon as she figured out how to look for eggs, she went and found them all!

Our first Easter was in Pearland.





Did I get them all?

Nope, found one more! She was on the porch and instead of going around, took an, um, shall we say...short cut!

Got it!

Now, back to the basket!


Running off to crack her eggs and check out the loot!

Our next egg hunt was in Cyclone. It was rainy and cool, the jacket was a must. I'm regretting now not getting a picture of her without the jacket because this dress is so cute on her!

The ground was literally littered with eggs and candy. It was really a free-for-all! Daddy helped Elizabeth get started.



Hey! This "hunting" is easy!

She got a little help topping off the basket!

Our final egg hunt was in Temple. Elizabeth had a great time hunting with Lucy and Mary! (Who, by the way, look super cute in their new glasses!)




Whoops, a little blurry...She's just taking a break from all of the fun.



She's pointing at the wind chime. They were hung high in the tree. She's saying "swing, swing" because they were swaying back and forth.

Ah, Daddy came to save the day...and the height problem!

Aren't they adorable?!

We had a great Easter and were so happy to get to spend it in so many places with so many people!

Hawi'i-Day 4

Ah, okay. We've made it to the last day of sight-seeing.

We spent the first half of the day driving through Kona down to Captain Cook.

Plumeria trees were everywhere. It is winter in Hawai'i, so there were no leaves on the Plumeria trees, but many of them were still flowering.



Bouganvilla also grew all over the place! We mostly saw it used as a hedge row along property lines, but also saw a few that had grown into giant flowering bushes. It was really neat to see.

We stopped at a small research farm that had 47 different varieties of fruit, nut, and flowering trees. Although it wasn't well kept, it was still really neat to see all of the different trees.

A coffee tree! Kona coffee "ranks among the best in today's gourmet market..." (Kona Historical Society). There are many small, 5-10 acre, coffee farms in the area. They all came together to form the Kona Pacific Farmers Cooperative. This allowed them to combine all of their harvests and contribute to the multi-million dollar business that is the coffee market.

This is a poinsettia tree! I've never seen such a thing. I can just imagine how much of an impact one of these would have at Christmas!

We stopped on the road to get pictures of this Plumeria farm.

We also stopped at the Kona Coffee Living History Farm. We didn't tour the farm, but we did step into the gift shop to buy some beans! This is a picture of a coffee tree that had lots of pretty red beans.

The remainder of the day was spent lounging around our room and the beach. The water was beautiful! I wish we would have spent more time there. Of course, no pictures of the beach! Neither one of us remembered to bring our cameras.

The water was crystal clear...and cold! Many people on the beach were snorkeling a little further out. We decided not to snorkel. I was a tad bit afraid that I would accidentally inhale some ocean in my breathing tube and drown. Besides, I couldn't touch the "floor" out there!

What was really amazing was the fact that there were no big swell waves. Nothing to surf on! The breeze seemed to always be pushing the water back out toward the ocean, so just being out there was really calming. There weren't tons of people on the beach, so it would have been a great place to just hang out and relax. Next time, right? :)

Day 5, Travis spent on another island looking at Jatropha and Chinese Tallow plantings, so I spent the morning relaxing in the room and packing all of our stuff. I shopped and wandered around for the rest of the afternoon until it was time to pick Travis up from the airport. Then it was off to eat a quick bite and back to the airport to start our journey home.

We had a great trip, but after being gone for a week, it was really, really good to see Elizabeth again and get back home!

Hawai'i-Day 3: Kilauea

Our last major attraction for Day 3 was a visit to Volcanoes National Park. The park was out of this world! That's the way it looked, anyway! It's as if we were taking a drive on a different planet. If we ever go back to this island, this would be worth seeing again.


Kilauea Caldera. Calderas are formed after a volcano erupts. The lava chamber empties enough during an eruption that the land above is no longer supported and it collapses. Kilauea's caldera is 1.9 miles by 3.1 miles.



These are steam vents and can be seen all over the place. Water seeps down cracks in the earth. As the water heats up in the hot earth, it rises and condenses into steam.


Craters also "litter" the landscape. Craters are formed when lava is forced out of its basin underground. The roof collapses and thus a crater is formed. Craters are not the main exit for lava.

You could actually hike down into some of the craters. If we had more time and it wasn't raining and if I was in better shoes, I would have liked to take a few hikes, too. Even though hiking really isn't my thing!

You can see old lava flows all over the place. Some of the much older flows have vegetation while the newer flows do not. Driving along, you really feel like you're on another planet. I think the scenes from Armageddon even popped into my head. You know, where they're on the asteroid...trying to blow it up...


This drive is called the Chain of Craters Road. You can stop and look at craters and the occasional steam vent for the first part of the drive.




We're driving down to the shore line where the volcano meets the ocean.





In this picture, you can see the different lava flows. Where the vegetation is is an old lava flow. The lava surrounding the vegetation is a lava flow that could have been as recent as 1972. It's really neat and interesting to see what the flows did and did not destroy on its way to the ocean.



This is the last part of our drive down to the coast. Lava flow as recently as 2003 flowed across the highway and blocked access to the highway.

If you click on the pictures, hopefully they will enlarge and you can get a better view. These pictures were behind glass at the station near the end of the road. The area inside of the red line is a shelf that collapsed in 2005. Forty-four acres of land disappeared into the ocean within four hours.

When the shelf collapsed, a lava fire hose spewed out of the side of the cliff.


The road is closed about a half mile away from where lava flowed over the road, so to get there, you have to hike. We're walking on the road and were tickled to see a little grove of palm trees amid all of the lava rock!

Still walking...

Whew! Made it. The lava over the road made me think of Ghostbusters and the giant marshmallow/Michelin Man!

Funny how it just stopped in some places and kept going in others.



"Road Closed." Well, obviously! The lava must have had a little sense of humor.
You can just barely see the yellow posts where there was a gate blocking off the road.

We walked around on the lava that flowed over the road for quite awhile. It's really surreal. There were giant mounds of lava with huge cracks. I think this is where there must have been trapped gas and when it escaped, it pushed the lava up into these formations.


The drive back out of the park.

Ah, what a day! The weather was not optimal for lava viewing, so we didn't get to see that, but there is still lava flowing out of the side of the volcano even today! It is so crazy to think that we were out walking and driving around an extremely active force of nature. If you are ever close to a volcano, go and see it! Definitely worth the time.