My Passport’s Travels

Another early morning to get up and go!! We had a quick Room Service breakfast and hit the gangplank at 9am. Bye,guys!

After a warm welcome, we took a quick taxi ride over to the airport and to pickup our car from Hertz. We hit the road for Volcano National Park. We stopped on the way in the little town of Volcano, grabbing snacks and drinks from a general store (including an amazing macadamia nut bar – shortbread, with caramel and tons of macadamia nuts on top) and some fun souvenirs from a quilting shop (a lunch bag, a turtle for Mom’s wall).

On to the volcano!

The Shaka Guide took us straight into the park to an overlook for the Kilauea caldera.  

It’s amazing to see the devastation- and the new growth coming up!  The orchids were especially pretty.

We even saw what we think was a seismic monitor of some sort.

As we left the area, there were some active steam vents by the parking lot. (And yes, I was surprised by the steam vent facial – who knew steam was hot?)

We continued down the road to another overlook of Kilauea – it really helped my understanding the immense size of the caldera.

The National Park lodge that was a stone’s throw away at the first overlook was almost impossible to see across the way.

We returned back to the park entrance and started down the Chain of Craters road, visiting several more lava craters.

While we continued our drive, we came actually this:

Eve and Mom took the short hike over to a lava tube, and Eve went exploring it!

(I ran taxi service in our cute SUV to pick them up since there wasn’t any close parking available.)

Then, it was time to head back to port. (Grabbing a picture of a pretty plane!)

We had a late lunch up on the pool deck, then headed to the room to pack. It’s much easier to think about getting off the ship tomorrow when there’s more fun coming!

All packed and changed for dinner, we headed to Cadillac Lounge for pre-dinner drinks, then to our traditional, last night cruise dinner at Palo. We had Louise again, who continued to delight us. She worked at Rose and Crown in 2018-2019 before moving to DCL.  I was also pleasantly surprised to learn they now have an amaretto soufflé which was amazing.  We rolled back to our room just in time to roll our bags out into the hall.  We’re full-steam ahead to Oahu!