Richardson Ocean Park and another Farmer’s Market

 Many of the “beaches” on the Big Island are places where the land meets the ocean, but the land is a lava flow. So it may be rocky, or even an abrupt drop-off.   The waves come in and crash against the rock, but you really can’t get in easily.  Of course maybe this varies by high and low tide.  But Linda was interested in trying to find a beach that is sand flowing gently into the water.  We read that the beach at Richardson Ocean Park, up near Hilo would meet that definition, so we drove up there.

Richardson Ocean Park is East of Hilo,  out near Leleiwi Point, where the coast stops going East and turns South.  We stopped by Foodland and picked up some sandwiches for a picnic.


It was another black sand beach and mostly rocky.  There was a picnic table in the shade, so we sat and ate our sandwiches and watched the people in the water. Linda went out in the water a couple of times, but I thought the water too cold.  But it was a beautiful day and there were lots of people swimming, sitting on the beach, talking and reading.  There was a rumor of a whale being sighted, but we didn’t see anything.

After a while, we drove into Hilo and noticed that they had a Farmer’s Market.  That made it very difficult to find parking,  but eventually we did.  Linda went to the Farmer’s Market while I went to a bookstore and then met her at the Farmer’s Market.  We walked around.

Then we drove home.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going North — Puukohola Heiau and the Waipio Valley

Image
 We have been over most of the South, West, and East parts of the Big Island, but that still leaves the North.  So we went North.  We drove up Highway 19 from Hilo, along the East Coast and then over to Waimea in the middle of the island and then over to the West Coast. The North part of the island is older and so the lava is more weathered and there is more dirt than in the South. It is much better for agriculture.  In fact we saw several fields with cows roaming around in them. This even plays into some of the history of the island.  Back in the 1700s the islands all had their own chiefs; the Big Island had several.  Including two, Kamehameha in the North, and Keoua in the South.  They were cousins, and rival chiefs. The Puukohola Heiau National Historic Site is the site of a temple (Heiau) that Kamehameha built to fulfill part of a prophecy that he would rule over all of Hawaii if he built a temple there and dedicated it to the war god Ku.  He ...
Read more

The Pacific Tsunami Museum and Ken’s House of Pancakes

 In driving thru Hilo a couple of times, I noticed a building with the title Pacific Tsunami Museum on it, and figured that might be interesting.  We tried to go a previous night, but it was closed for a private event,  so we figured now would be a good time.  That turned out to be too naive, when we got there, we were told they were closing early and we only had 40 minutes before they closed.  But we looked around and got the gist of it. Tsunami’s are typically caused by earthquakes along a coast and cause very long wavelength waves to propagate in all directions. Since Hawaii sort of sits in the middle of the Pacific, it turns out an earthquake anywhere around the Pacific Ocean coast can cause a tsunami in Hawaii (and other places too, but the focus here in Hawaii is Hawaii).  Hilo has been hit by a number of tsunamis, from earthquakes in Chili, Russia, Japan, Alaska, and more. The waves are really interesting.  Most normal waves have a relatively sh...
Read more

Back to the Volcano, one last time

Image
We have done several hikes in and around Volcanoes National Park but we have not hiked the crater rim trail itself much.  So we thought we would go back to the park one more time and hike that trail.  Well, not all the trail, since it is quite long.  But we could start at one end, hike until we were tired, or got to a part that we had already hiked, then go to the other end and hike back from there. So we started by going to the end of the Crater Rim Drive - West and going to Uekahuna which is the highest point on the crater rim.  We hiked back towards the Visitor’s Center about a mile and a half.  That got us quite close to the crater rim in several places.  It’s difficult to tell by looking over the edge, but if you look a bit to your left or right, you can see that the crater rim just falls off almost vertically. which is why the trail stays well back from the actual rim most of the way. The mile and a half hike got us back to the steam vents, and Sulphu...
Read more