ALOHA Dear Friends!

It was great having Don & Heidi visiting from Arizona, always fun to hang out with those two!
I mean, just look at them:

How could anyone not have fun with this pair!?

Saturday after the botanical gardens we were treated to a wonderful dinner at Kimo & Tracy's house as well as loads of fun playin poker. Tracy, as usual went out all the way and prepared huge amounts of the most delicious food, it was a Chinese buffet that could've passed as being catered by the best catering service in town, yummm!

On Sunday Don really wanted to go on one of those helicopter rides, and asked me if I would go with him because Heidi was not up for the task, so I agreed....

Here we are getting ready for take off. Got to admit that we were a bit worried that we had fallen into a typical "tourist trap" and that is because as we were approaching the chopper the bunch of tourists that were coming off had the most boring look in their faces....uh oh..

Turned out to be a very cool ride. Flew over the Kilauea caldera, got to see active lava through two of the open vents, very impressive..

Here is the Kilauea caldera as we made our approach in the chopper.

In this picture one can see some of the lava in one of the open vents in the caldera!

From there we flew down to the coast where Kalapana used to stand before the whole town got covered by the lava flows of the 90's. There was a small place where lava was flowing into the ocean creating a huge steam column of water vapor and hydrochloric acid (nice stuff).

When we got off the chopper Don and I were like two little kids who just got off their first roller coaster ride: ear to ear grins and wanting to do it again! Weird thing was that the rest of the people from our chopper, and the other choppers got down with that bored expression in their faces.... tourists... who understands them!?

After the great chopper ride we went back to the Plum Palace so Heidi could say hi to her old buddy Angus, we chilled out had some beers and grilled some fish, an excellent way to wrap up a wonderful weekend with two great friends!

We loved having you guys here, come back soon!