Work To Live

We left Volcano National Park and headed west towards the Kona side of the island. On our way we stopped off at Punalu'u Black Sand Beach, which was beautiful. We enjoyed splashing around in the warm clear water looking at endangered Hawksbill turtles who were happy to swim around your feet while we tried to keep a safe distance from them.  A little further down the road, we took a turning on the recommendation of one of our friends on Facebook to Ka Lae, the southernmost point in both the Hawaiian Islands and the United States. From here we had planned to hike to Papakōlea beach, also known as Green Sand Beach. A bit of googling on route showed that it was going to be a 2-3 hour hike from the parking lot to get to the beach and we had arrived at the hottest part of the day. We decided to miss it out this time   Our next stop was Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park. This turned out to be one of our favourite places during the trip. Until the ...

Our second day on Big Island was Volcano Day!  We left the B&B after a lovely breakfast and headed just 5 minutes down the road to Kaumana Caves County Park. We pulled up in the car park, crossed the road and saw a little picnic area with a metal ladder heading down into what looked like a rock slide. We did wonder once or twice whether we were in the right place and also whether this was really safe (and covered by our travel insurance!).  The ladder took us down to a collapsed portion of a lava tube what was created by an 1881 flow from Mauna Loa. You could walk into the left and the right portions of the tube and apparently walk up to 25 miles, not that anyone would want to do this. There were no lights in the tube, we had meant to bring a flash light but forgot and realised that the lights on our mobiles were pretty useless in complete blackness.  There is no path in this tube, it was a case of scrambling over rocks and lava in the dark. It was a lot of fun but wi...

Partly as an excuse to buy a brand new mitre saw, but also to build something that looked quite nice whilst at the same time being a practical solution to the problem of where to store our kiln-dried logs - which come in bulk - I built a log store from scratch. I took inspiration from the many different approaches you can find on YouTube, but in the end the design is my own and I think it turned out pretty good. The logs arrived today, so I guess the proof is in the pudding and we'll see how it stacks up (geddit?!) when I transfer them in the next couple of days.