Trip to Hawaii - Day 7 Wed Dec 7

Wow, where has the time gone. Let’s see There’s eating… then napping… then eating… Oh, and a little bit of reading too.

But today we arrive in Hilo. Found our shuttle. Not the easiest thing to do but we managed.
And, once again we received an ‘upgrade’. And I lose the term loosely. It was a White grand caravan! The caravan was bad enough, but did it have to be white??? I wonder if there's some way of indicating that some customers wouldn't consider a van an upgrade. Hmmm.

We headed straight for Richardson beach. Missed it by one road, but we could have walked to it. Actually, I did while Steve moved the "car".

But before that: There’s an old ramp cut out of the rock and just to the right of that we saw a good sized turtle. (thanks to the Hawaiian gentleman who let us know it was a good place for turtle sitings). It was a little rough, but we did manage to see a turtle, he was hard to see and as soon as I pointed him out to Steve, the turtle decided to take off. But at least he saw it before it left.

Note to self: I'm going to have to buy a pair of polarized sun glasses before our next trip. Steve's sunglasses were much better for seeing the turtles from above the water.

Richardson beach looked like a pretty good place to snorkel if the waves weren’t so rough we would have.

There’s a lot of little beaches on the way to Richardson. We did a little beach hopping around here. We had some really great sitings of turtles at a place called Keaukaha. Just a little down the road from Richardson beach, but this would be a good place for shallow snorkelling. There would be good odds you’d encounter a sea turtle.

(After seeing the pics from the gopro camera that Steve stuck in the water, we should have snorkelled! There were lots of fish down there. We didn't see it until we got home, but there was a small eel in the water, swimming along the rocks)

Once again, someone told us where there were 3 turtles. 1 large one and a couple of smaller ones. Another large one showed up too. Steve got some really great video with the gopro. We had just walked by the life guard tower when the gal told us.

We then walked a bit further to the right, there was a ladder for easy access to the water. The kids there were complaining that there weren’t any turtles. I would have told them about our find, except that they were very whiney.
But then a large turtle showed up at the ladder and the kids were afraid to get into the water. Steve got some really good video of this turtle.

It started raining a few times, so we jumped in the car and did some more driving. We even took the ‘scenic route’ which took us by the botanical gardens. We didn’t stop there, but it gives an idea of where we were. The route really was scenic. We saw lots of rain forest type foliage. And lots of awesome views of the ocean.

We did make it to Big Island Candies and bought tons of goodies for everyone back home. (And this time we actually brought it home - didn't leave it in the fridge THIS time).

And the Island Scrapbooking store wasn't bad either. Lot's of Hawaii related stuff. And a fair selection of Stamps. There were a couple snorkeller type stamps that I wish I had picked up. I don't think they do orders though. So I'll have to plan another trip to Hawaii...