Sunday December 6th was Bonny and I’s 6 month wedding anniversary which might not seem like a huge land mark, especially in measuring the success of a marriage, but we thought it sounded like a great reason to celebrate and take a day to go see some new sights.  Since our six month anniversary fell on a Sunday, and most of the good beaches are full of locals on weekends, we decided to take Monday the 7th off and go do some more sight seeing and adventuring not far from the house, about a 30-45 minute drive.

I was gifted a book called, “The Big Island Revealed” and it’s been our local guide to awesome spots all over the island.  Each of the places we visited can be found in the book and it really is a handy resource to have since the locals don’t like sharing the location of these spots to strangers, but I’m a local now so it’s my job to find and explore these places so you can all enjoy them when you come visit.

The first spot we stopped was Lava Tree State Park, a beautiful little park that you can walk through, complete with trees entombed by the lava flow of I can’t remember when.  For some reason we took several “goofy” pictures at this park and some of them probably aren’t even appropriate to post but what fun would it be to keep them to our selves?  Not much!  So here they are.

   
    
    
    
 The next stop was a place called the “Goddess Pond” this place was a lot harder to find but we did eventually find it, we also found this road along the way.  

 The road is incredibly beautiful with a jungle canopy covering it most of the way.  The ponds them selves are about a 1/4 mile off the road, we could’ve drove the jeep to them but it was a pretty extreme train and we wanted to make sure it was the right road and not some ones drive way.  The ponds them selves are naturally formed by the lava, they are constantly filled with incoming surf from the ocean, in the one picture you can see a water fall coming from the pond.  We didn’t stop to swim here because the next place we wanted to check out is a naturally heated hot springs called Champagne Pond.  These pictures were taken on the jeep trail to the goddess ponds, this place looks like something out of Lord of the Rings, it’s seemingly unreal in some places.

   
    
 We also grabbed these two coconuts that have already sprouted palm trees and planted them at the house.  

    
 
Champagne Pond was a nice big pool with lots of fish and warm water to swim in but had a lot more people but still less than other places we would go later.  There are two ways to access it, a 20 minute 4×4 trail or sneak past the ‘illegal” gate into a neighborhood with direct access.  We took the jeep trail this time but next time we want to go here I think we’ll be coming back on the motorcycle and sneaking past the gate.  As a small side note, the 4×4 trail has a few good spots to go whipping (fishing).  We stopped and ate a sack lunch we had packed in the cooler here. 

    
 A lot of spots in this area have heated pools or hot ponds.  We wanted to stop at this large popular one, I don’t remember the name yet, but by the time of the day we got their (3:30), it was totally packed with people and we decided to move on. The last stop on our day long adventure brought us to Black Sands beach. Most places on the big island don’t have sandy beaches at all because they take thousands of years to form and a lot of this ocean front property was born in the last 500 years. So the sandy beaches are really few and far between. Black sand is the most common from all the lava. This beach was really beautiful and very laid back to say the least. It’s actually an unspoken nude beach and several people were sporting the birthday suits but don’t get to excited. It was primarily senior citizen cock flopping around and we did see a few naked people getting knocked around by the waves. Not the most flattering but none the less, hard to look away.  

   So that was our six month anniversary in a nut shell. We had a wonderful day exploring together.  We hope you liked it. Aloha!