Day 7 -- Hawaii

January 2, 2015

We headed south today toward Volcano National Park.  It is about 90 miles from Kona on a two lane highway. 

Our first stop was at Ka-Lae (South Point.)  It is the southern most point of the United States.  It is the closest I will ever get to Antarctica.  Unfortunately I did not see any penguins.

Next we stopped at the Green Sand Beach.  The book says it is a 2 1/4 mile hike to the beach one way.  We thought we can handle this.......I grabbed a bottle of water and we could see the ocean in front of us.  How far could it be?  It didn’t look that difficult.  OK......you walk down to the beach and then you begin the 2 1/4 mile hike south through what looks like desert to the green sand beach.  I was ready to wimp out many times, it was hot, it was a desert, it was very far away, it was so rocky at times.  However Joe encouraged me to make it up to one more hill, twenty hills later, we finally saw the green sand beaches.  The best part of the hike was that we saw a humpback whale in the ocean.   

Then we had to turn around an hike back!  Sue’s lesson of the day:  The next time a sketchy looking man in a run-down looking truck offers to give you a ride for $15 one way instead of hiking…..say YES!

We returned to the car, sun-burnt, thirsty, tired and extremely dirty from all the dust.

We drove on some more and we found the Punalu’s Black Sand Beach. 
It was super windy out so we did not spend a lot of time there. 

We were still recovering from our last stop and we were hungry.  The beach was beautiful however we did move on. 

Now we are at our new lodging and we decided to take a break from the big hotel chains and stay at a little quaint cottage, with no tv.  It is rainy and windy out.  We had dinner at the Volcano House Bar and went to the Volcano visitor center so we can plan our adventure for tomorrow.