Hawaii Arrival

 For our trip to Hawaii, we had the same flight from Dallas to Kona as Nora and Adrian. The cousins were very delighted to see each other in the airport!  The flight itself was long, but not as bad as we had expected. :)

The Kona airport is small and largely open-air, so we felt like we were really in Hawaii as soon as we stepped off the plane!  We got our rental van (the lowest-end model of van, we think, but it got the job done), and then found a place to eat -- a recommended local place called Ultimate Burger, which was indeed very delicious.  (They had a dipping sauce for the fries that was quite addictive!)

Then we headed to our resort, which was mostly along empty roads -- I didn't expect that there would be so much wide open space right in the tourist areas.  It was cool to see the (old) lava areas right by the side of the road, and we even spotted a rainbow. :)

The resort we stayed in was beautiful and also big, which was slightly inconvenient when we had our massive amounts of luggage, but wonderful otherwise. They had a monorail, which seemed really cool -- although the thrill wore off a little bit when we realized that it was actually the world's slowest monorail. :)  I guess they didn't want to take the chance of mowing over any careless tourists!

We were there in time for sunset and the boys took a dip in one of the pools with a small slide -- a nice start to the vacation!