The Wesley's Honeymoon trip to Hawaii

Day 11
(Matt n Jenny)

Today we got up and fueled up on Captain Crunch French Toast!!! (thank you Jess!) Then we set out for some State Parks.

I pulled up the GPS and asked Jenny: "do you wanna take the regular route or the route that takes us by the coast?... the coast says it has "restricted access"... but i think that's just for idiots who can't drive" Jenny said ... "lets go by the coast"

So we did.

Let me preface this adventure by saying this: whenever GPS tells you there is "restricted access"... DO NOT IGNORE THIS OR TAKE IT LIGHTLY!!! restricted access in this instance meant 4wheel drive vehicles or Jeep Wranglers only!! (NOT rented mustangs)

So.... we hop on this road which switches from blacktop to light gravel after a few hundred feet... nothing the car can't handle. We should've known better when we passed a surveying crew and they gave us the "they won't get far" look.

After a bit the road got rougher, and we got to a point where i felt ballsy enough to try to force the car over some big rocks... and we ended up bottoming out a couple times before my blood pressure got to its max and we threw in the towel and turned around (which was a challenge in itself) and went back 2 miles of bumpy 5mph rocky driveway-style road.... and bottomed out another 2 times. After that we decided if any road has no blacktop... we DON'T go down it!

On to the parks!

First, we stopped at Lava Tree State Park. A few hundred years ago, lava came up out of a fissure and caught an entire forest on fire... and the larger trees were covered in lava and burned from the inside out.... what remains are the hollow lava formations where the trees stood.

and here is jenny picking live flowers and ignoring signs that say it is illegal to alter any plantlife in a protected forest

and here's jenny saying "pose for the camera and act like you're walking down the trail"

there were some cool plants growing in Lava Tree:

After Lava Tree, we headed inland to Volcano National Park.

And something we learned only after we got here.... Lava has been flowing to the ocean fairly steadily since 1983.... until last month, when the lava "tube" that has carried it to the shore, collapsed and the lava cannot be seen either by the ocean or by the volcano crater... which was slightly disappointing, since we had planned a "lava-boat" tour at night.

The scenery is still pretty cool... here are some of the pictures. We went to a few of the steam vents, steaming craters, a lava tube cave, and the last big flow from 1972 that covered much of the mountain.

Jenny was wearing a cover because it was raining up in the mountain, and the temperature was about 15-20 degrees colder up there.

We headed back to the house and cooked up dinner with some chicken and Purple Hawaiian potatoes!