This was our last full day, so we decided to go exploring and check out the beach at the Mauna Kea resort. We were very lucky; we got 2 of the last parking spaces! The beach was beautiful but the waves were a little bigger than before. Eli was OK with that!
Even Brian was swimming in the waves:
A view of the whole beach:
Back at the condo, my little card sharks got down to business. They have been seriously obsessed with UNO lately. Here Brian is showing Eli which card to play:
And here I deviate a bit...this is not an adventure the boys came along on. In the afternoon I took a snorkel trip with Denise and Tim, while Eli stayed home for a nap with Grandma and Brian went to the visitors' center of the Mauna Kea observatory with Grandpa. They are not quite old enough for snorkeling! Our fist stop was the Captain Cook monument, which marks the spot where he was killed on one of his expeditions.
From here, we mroe or less just jumped in the water. The snorkeling in Kealakekuabay is great... it is protected, and teeming with fish.
A turtle going to hide in the reef.
The dropoff...the water goes from being 5-10 feet deep to, um, VERY deep. It's literally the edge of a cliff with the deep blue ocean beyond.
Some pretty fish:
A moray eel was hiding in this one!
Gill, from Finding Nemo. I didn't find Nemo, though.
As soon as we got out of the water, we saw dozens of dolphins around our boat! They are Hawaiian spinner dolphins and we did see them leaping and spinning. Most of my pictures look like this, though.
Our boat took us back along the lava cliffs. It was pretty neat, and a little scary at times as we zoomed straight towards the cliff.
We all got back around the same time and headed to the pool before dinner. I stayed with Eli at the little pool and watched him drive the jeep around the sand and over the lava rocks.
Then he went with grandma in the hot tub, to watch the sunset.
Watching our last sunset in Hawaii!
