Sorry for the wait. We'll try to get better at this.

Hello everyone!  Sorry it’s been so long since we last posted.  We really dropped the ball on that one.  But, here’s a new story for all of you!  The trip we took on Saturday, January 19 was down to the southern point of the island to a beach called Green Sands.  The southern tip of the Big Island is the southern-most point in the US.  We stopped at a bakery in Punalu`u that was very good and was advertised as the “Southern-Most Bakery in the USA.”  They have the best Passion Fruit glazed donuts ever!! And quite possibly the only ones...? Anyways, after the bakery, we continued down to South Point.  We took some small roads and it made both Ashley and I think of Iowa.  It was a junk road and had farms on both sides.  They graze cattle down there, rather than grow corn, but it was still very similar to Iowa.  Only with a huge ocean to look at. :) We parked the vans, and had to make a 2.5-mile hike to the beach.  The reason you have to hike, is because the terrain is too tough to cross with vehicles.  So, as you can imagine, it’s not that easy on foot.  It’s very rocky, and there’s no cover from the sun.  Needless to say, we both got a little sunburnt.  We finally made it to the beach and had to go down a really steep incline.  Here’s a little science behind this beach.  The beach is now on the shore, but many years ago, it was a caldera for the volcano.  The magma came into contact with the mineral Olivine, and when the magma came out of the volcano, it laid down black lava rock, with a hint of this green gem.  So after thousands of years of erosion, this beach has formed, and there are little specs of green olivine gems throughout the black lava rock sand.  This makes it one of two green sand beaches in the world! Very cool. We made the climb down into the caldera, where the beach now is, and swam down there for a few hours, then had to hike all the way back to the vans.  It was a long day, and we’re both glad we went, but don’t ask us to go there again.  It was a pretty draining day and we both got pretty burnt and were tired of walking.  You can make it to the beach in 4-wheel drive vehicles so if we ever go again, we’ll be renting a Jeep to get there.  

In other news, I’m trying to get a site figured out to share pictures with all of you and I think I’m going to use Shutterfly so hopefully that works out for us! We're excited to give you an actual look at what we've been up to.  I’ll get you all the link in our next post, which I’m going to do very soon on our trip we took paddleboarding in Hilo Bay.

Until then, Much Aloha!

-Jon and Ashley