We're back now. here are the last :( of the vacation photos.
The airport in Kona allows passengers to walk out to the plane and then climb the stairs. Fun experience, probably because it's so different! We board a larger plane on a different island before heading back to Portland.
Frog and lizards in this picture too. The lizards must have been pulled off of a white wall because you can hardly see them here.
This is as close as we got to the lava/volcano. The real volcano experience can happen at the active volcano but the drive is about 2 hours away. We opted to not drive on a windy road in the hot car to see the same thing that we could see everywhere else on the island, including right in town. So we found a lava tube to explore instead. There are five volcanoes on the big island, only one of which is considered extinct (not likely to ever become active again). One is considered dormant, the other three are active. We have been in Hawaii before to the Kilauea Volcano flow, where the lava oozes out of a crust at a very very very slow rate. Currently, the volcanic activity at Kilauea is happening in an underground flow, so we wouldn't have seen anything for the kids to be impressed with.
