Kona Trip - Part 1

Our ward put together a Temple trip. The Laie Temple is closed for at least 18 months for renovations and the closest temple is the Kona Hawaii temple on the Big Island. This is the first time we have gone to any of the other islands in Hawaii and we were really excited. We were only going to have a few days, we flew out Thursday night and flew back on Saturday night, so it was a short but highly adventurous trip. There are so many fun things we did with a lot of pictures so I am going to break it down into several different blog entries so I can post more pictures.

The kids were so excited to go to the airport. Sophia was too little when we flew last summer to remember it so this was the first time she remembered going to the airport or being on a plane. She loved all of it. The Honolulu airport is very small and doesn't feel like a regular airport and the Kona Airport is even smaller. This is right by where we were to board the plane and it was the perfect jungle gym for the kids to climb and play on while we waited for our flight. Our flight was full of old people and tourists so our little family stuck out pretty well.

Anything the boys do Sophia tries to do to. She did pretty well but didn't dare go much past where she could safely jump down, which was just fine with me. The flight was only 45 minutes but I was still hoping they could wear off some of their energy before we got on the plane.

Sophia and Daniel were so excited. As soon as they sat down Sophia got on her seatbelt and began playing with everything within her reach. Thankfully the seat in front of her was occupied by Sterling because she was putting the tray up and down and bumping the seat almost the whole flight. She thought this by itself was a great adventure.

Sterling and James sat in front of us. James has the emergency safety card in his hands because he read over it several times and was getting every last detail from it that he could. He is my safety man. He is all about the rules and things you can and can not do. He was much more calm for this flight than our flight to Utah in June so that was nice.

For some reason my camera wouldn't capture the amazing sun. Here it looks like a regular sun going down but it was bright orange, it was so amazing. This is the sunset when we landed in Kona. On Oahu we don't get to see the sun actually disappear with the horizon very often, most of the time it goes behind a hill or buildings, it was really neat to watch it dissapear into what looked like the ocean.

The black in front of the ocean is all the lava rock that covers almost all of the Big Island. It was amazing to see everything with lava rock around it and the things they would build and do with the lava rock.