This is now our second Sunday on vacation, but the first Sunday we spent most of the day waiting at the airport and flying. Today we wanted a slower and more relaxed day – we did a pretty good job and even managed not to spend any money the entire day. We believe that we should minimize activities on Sunday that make someone else work so that it can be a day of rest for them as well. This is way more difficult to do while on vacation then when we’re at home – we went grocery shopping last night to make it possible.
Our first stop was the Kona Hawaii Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Normally while vacationing on Sunday we try to stop at a local church congregation and join them for Sunday services. With COVID restrictions and not rot really knowing if they were holding in-person or zoom only meetings, we decided to stop by the temple instead. These temples are always beautiful, very well maintained, and have a special spirit.
From there we visited Kaloko – Honokohau National Historic Park. We try to incorporate a lot of state and national parks in our travels because we figure they are good places to view and learn about historical or other interesting places.
At the visitor center they suggested that to reduce the amount of walking in the heat, someone drive the car to a parking lot that is closer to the beach. There are some petroglyphs carved in the lava as you walk down to the beach, but they are so warn that most of them are difficult to make out. There is an obvious picture of a rifle. There are some who think that many of the battles with foreigners happened here. There are several structures that represent the ancient Hawaiian buildings which may have included places of worship and places to build boats.
Kaloko means “the pond,” and this fishpond is the main feature of this location. The Hawaiians built a 30 foot wide 6 foot high seawall to create a pond next to the ocean. They created small openings allowing fish to enter, but prevent them from returning to the ocean when they grow larger. This fish pond provided the people with a constant supply of fish. There are also remnants of fish traps located nearby – these traps would allow fish to enter at high tide and be stuck during low tide. We didn’t really notice the fish traps, probably because they are partially submerged in the ocean, or we didn’t walk far enough around the bay to get a better view (an areal view makes it obvious what is here).
The sand was a fun mixture of white, brown, and black sand
We saw our first turtle basking on a beach.
Next we wanted to find a good beach to do some body surfing since our Airbnb had several that we could borrow. We tried to drive the road to Mahai’ula beach, but the road isn’t paved all the way out and only high clearance vehicles were taking the road due to poor road conditions. We made it half way out and decided it wasn’t worth the risk to our rental vehicle. We drove a few more miles up the road to Manini’owali Beach (Kua Beach). The parking lot was full and cars were lining both sides of the street. The beach was nice and ok for body surfing (we really wish we had these body boards at the green sand beach.
The sand was great and the kids enjoyed building huge structures to block the waves – this was a futile attempt and it probably only lasted an hour or less after they stopped reinforcing it.
Relaxing at our beautiful Airbnb after eating lasagna & salad for dinner.
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