Today marks the end of our stay on Hawai’i, the Big Island in the Hawaii chain of islands.
But before that, we decided to fit in as much sight-seeing as we could before our flight in the afternoon.
After visiting a local drive-thru coffee place and a bakery place (that had monkey bread), we headed from Hilo to nearby Pahoa to visit their Lava Tree Park. You can get an idea of where Pahoa is in this map, where our route today is in red:

Day 6 Route (red)
At this point, we’ve pretty much gone around the entire Big Island. As the person who did most of the driving, I’ve got to say that it’s been really interesting circumnavigating the island, you get to see a lot of different kinds of scenery, everything from the Jurassic Park-style rain forests that seem to be the default, to the dry, grassy plains in the rain shadow of the volcanoes, to the really tall trees near the northern part that remind me of driving through California, and driving along the coast, which is as tropical and picturesque as one would expect from Hawaii.
We got to Lava Tree Park, and the first thing is that all the trees are huge.

Lava Tree Park
Continued…