The previous day’s travel was pretty exhausting, but I slept VERY well. In fact, I was out cold as soon as my head hit the pillow. The rest of the family was up for at least an hour after I was but I never noticed, so I woke up fresh and relaxed.

We all got up around 6:00 am and made our way to the club lounge when it opened at 6:30 in order to see what they had for breakfast. It was billed as a continental breakfast, though it had three hot options including scrambled eggs but no bacon. There were some fresh fruit and yogurt available as well as toast, pastries, and some cereal options. It wasn’t the best we’ve had but was far from the worst and definitely a money and time saver.

Off to the Volcano!

It was the 4th of July so we both had the day off. While I wasn’t planning to work for the entire vacation, my wife had some commitments at work so she would have to work some of the days. She’d have the 4th of July off but would have to work on Friday the 5th and much of the rest of the weekdays we’d be on vacation. Since we only had two full days on the Big Island where we were both off, we figured we’d try going to the volcano first thing since it was about a 2-hour drive according to Google Maps.

We got some snacks from the hotel gift shop piled into our rental car and headed off towards the volcano. The road quickly got more rural, surrounded by an ever-changing landscape. It was a winding two-lane road. Tomatico was reading a book which we later realized wasn’t a great mix with the winding road and cushy ride of our rental SUV. About 15 miles into the ride he started getting dizzy. We pulled off to the side of the road while he felt better but after a few more miles we decided to turn around and head back to the hotel to recover.

Lunch in Town

After a couple of hours sleeping in the hotel room while his brother and my wife enjoyed the pool, we were all feeling hungry so we made our way into town to find some lunch. We ended up eating in the same complex as the pizza place we had gone to the previous night. We ate at a restaurant with a beautiful view overlooking the ocean. The food was only average, though. After lunch, we walked toward the center of town and stopped at several of the shops along the way.

We even stopped to get some ice cream at a shoot that had some interesting local flavors. Tomatico tried a bright purple flavor that was a Hawaiian sweet potato. It was an interesting flavor for sure, but he only ate about half of it. The flavor was a bit overwhelming so I’m not surprised, but it was definitely an interesting choice!

After about an hour of walking around the kids were ready to return to the hotel.

Resort Time

Back at the hotel, the kids were excited to get some more pool time. The boys had a blast on the slide that they had initially dismissed as “boring”. Gravity is such a fun toy and their minds were quickly changed.

After a couple of hours, it started to rain and they closed the slide but not the rest of the pool. This made the pool less interesting and since my wife and I were getting wet, we decided to head back up to the room to change before heading down to the game room.

In the game room, the foosball table was free and decided on a little family competition. My wife and Tomatico would take on our youngest and me. We had several competitive games that went down to the last few points. I won’t say who won *cough* we did *cough* but it was a focus of conversation for days to come.

It was time for the lounge to open so we wandered over there to see what was on the menu. They had chicken and shredded pork sliders available. The pork was pretty good but the chicken was cold and not very good. We got about half a meal out of it.

Next door to the lounge the hotel had a restaurant and bar call Rays on the Bay. We wandered over to look at the menu, hoping we could find something to fill up on while listening to the live music. The menu looked interesting, though pricey, but in the end, it was a 45-minute wait to get a table so we ended up going to a sports bar by the pool instead. The food was overpriced as expected, but okay. It was better than having to go into town during the 4th of July parade to fight the crowds and try to find something there between rain showers.

By the time we were finished eating it was almost 8:00 when the fireworks in nearby Kailua-Kona were scheduled. We quickly headed up to the room and found that we had a great view from our balcony. Despite the rain, they looked fantastic (in contrast to the pictures we took) and were much more enjoyable from our sheltered balcony than they would have been in town in the rain.

Once the fireworks were done we were all ready for bed. While we didn’t make it to the volcano as we had originally hoped, we did manage to do a fair amount of stuff done. We’d have to wait until Saturday to try again for the volcano as my wife had to work on Friday.