Our trip to Hawaii was amazing. It’s Hawaii, right? I mean, we really would have had to work at it to make it not amazing.
By far one of the coolest thing that happened was something we didn’t even plan. On day three, Stella had a bad sunburn – Mom of the year right here – so we decided to keep her out of the ocean and take a drive.
As we were heading up into the interior of the island we saw hitchhikers trying to catch a ride. Now, I’m a sucker for hitchhikers. I like to refer to hitchhikers as people who can’t escape my incessant need for small talk.
And really, where else can you meet people ‘taking a gap year to work on an organic lettuce farm’ – for real, that’s what they were doing on the big island. I swear, people are so fascinating. Everyone. Even all the boring engineers I live around in Huntsville – everyone has an interesting story.
We asked the farmers if they had any recommendations for things to do on the island and they were quick to tell us, “Oh, you should totally go to this secret beach we know about! It’s only accessible by walking down this really steep path and then crossing a small river to get to the trail and then you go thru this forest area and it’s a hard hike – but you should totally do it!”
Well, really what else could we do but go! After dropping our friendly neighborhood hitchhikers off at a grocery store we started off to find the beach.
The view from the top was incredible. Well, I mean, it was less incredible when we realized that we didn’t have Gracie’s shoes and had to drive an hour and a half back to get them but that just gave us the opportunity to collect the teenagers and make them come too.
Y’all, they weren’t kidding about the treacherous nature of the path. It was five hundred feet down to the bottom and even with a plethora of grownups to help with the littles I was still nervous.
Definitely a tough hike!
But when we got to the bottom a beautiful rocky coast appeared and, yes, the river and forest we needed to cross to get to the black sand beach.
The black sand was powder fine and felt amazing. We all just wanted to roll in it.
Someone had hung rope swings in the forest area and the kids wanted to swing for as long as we would let them.
It was…I mean, look at the pictures! It was just as lovely and wild as it all appeared.
After the excruciatingly difficult hike back up we stopped at this lovely little ice cream stand to recuperate.