The Wedded Write: Porcupines Take on Hawaii- Exploring the Island

On most vacations I like to plant myself on a beach chair and read a book or two after coating myself in nine layers of sun block. Mr. P. on the other hand gets pretty antsy. He can't sit long without anything to do, so for our honeymoon we agreed to do a little exploring along with the relaxation. We really only had one full day sitting at the beach. The rest of our time there, we would spend ½ of the day lounging and the other half exploring.

The two things we wanted to do the most in Hawaii were zipping and touring the National Volcano Park. For our zip line adventure we chose Kohala Zipline. They took a group of about 10 of us over to the course, and after a brief explanation on how to zip (contrary to what I thought, you don’t just latch on and jump off a platform), we were zipping down about 8 to 10 lines.

Yes, this was as scary as it looks, but we were latched on

Beautiful views from the zip platforms

It was pretty awesome to be literally up in the trees. I’ve only zipped one other time at a camp in some forest somewhere in upstate New York. It was definitely much mellower there. I never realized just how long zip lines can be.

This zip was something like a quarter of a mile long!

Sick gloves...

In the middle of the week we spent an entire day on the Hilo side of the island touring the National Volcano Park. Mr. P booked the “twilight tour” with Hawaii Forest and Trails. Our tour guide picked us up in a van at our hotel, and took our group on the 2 ½ hour drive to the park. The tour was great for us since the alternative would have been us blindly walking around the park in confusion.

“Oh, a tree?” “What’s that smoke?” "Rocks... hmm, yes, rocks."

Our guide told us stories about the volcano’s past eruptions, pointed out interesting plants and animals, and got us up close to creepy spots that we wouldn’t have otherwise known about.