Spring Break - Big Island - Day 2

The kids wanted to go swimming again Tuesday morning so that's how we spent the first few hours that day.  They started in the swimming pool then we moved out to the beach area of our hotel.  We stayed at the Marriott Courtyard King Kamehameha's Kona Beach Hotel and there was a nice private beach area that was perfect for the kids to snorkel and swim...except Halen didn't want to get sand in his shoes so he stood on the sidewalk next to the beach and watched the whole time...silly boy!

If you look close, you can see the ocean from our room

You can see a temple that was rebuilt during King Kamehameha's reign

How Halen played at the beach :(

You can see the top of the temple from our hotel beach

Once we finished swimming, we got changed and headed back over the center mountains to go to the Mauna Loa nut factory in Hilo.  We had seen it from the road the day before but we knew it closed at 5:00 and it was close to that when we went by so we decided to hike 'Akaka Falls instead and come back to the nut factory later.  I think we ended up spending about as much in and around Hilo as we did Kona. :)  There really wasn't much to see at the nut factory...mostly just a store, but you could look through the windows and kinda see what they were doing with the nuts inside.

We did get some yummy ice cream there

We went to hike Rainbow Falls after visiting Mauna Loa.  It was a really easy hike and the views were incredible.  Such a pretty waterfall.

We hiked to the top of the falls

The kids couldn't wait to get back to the hotel to swim some more so we headed back to Kona.  Every time we drove across the mountains, it rained...sometimes hard...off and on.  I took this picture from the car looking out at a couple of the volcanoes peeking out of the clouds with a little rainbow trying to form.

The rest of the day was spent swimming and snorkeling in the pool.  The kids decided it was just as much fun...or more fun in Halen's case...than in the ocean.  We're just really not beach people.  We probably spent a total of an hour at the actual beach and we were ok with it.