Here are the additional pictures I’ve been promising. Snorkeling pictures can be seen here.

Pictures of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park can be viewed here.

Finally, I’ve collected a few shots of various beaches and other miscellaneous items located at this link.

Or you can view a summary page of all five of our Hawaii galleries at this link.

As I alluded to in one of my previous posts, we toured the big Island by chopper last Friday. We toured with Blue Hawaiian tours, the Cadillac of helicopter tours, and saw some great sites of the western, northern, and northeastern sections of the island. The aircraft was top of the line and decked out with several video cameras that taped our tour. When finished with the tour, a DVD of our flight complete with commentary by the pilot was immediately made available to us. Everything about the experience really was remarkable and professionally put together. They have another tour that takes you over to the Volcanoes National Park to actively see live lava flows, but it was a much longer flight and a bit too pricey….maybe next time. Click here to see a few snapshots that we captured during our flight.

I’m in the process of uploading some of the pictures from our hotel at the Keahou resort area in Kona. This is a great hotel with a lot to offer. The hotel is on the water and we were lucky enough to have a ocean view from our room. Because it faced to the west, the sunsets were always entertaining, and the beach there was a top rated snorkeling location. Other notables were the groups of Hawaiian green turtles, an endangered species, who sun bathed along the shore. They were sluggish, but still fun to watch. You can click here to see a gallery of some sunset shots and other informal shots around the hotel. I’ll be adding volcano, helicopter, and snorkeling pictures later in the week. Stay tuned.

We took a 55 minute helicopter tour today of the big island just around noon local time. It was the first time either Margie or I had flown in a chopper, so needless to say we were quite excited. The company we toured with really took care of us and showed us more than we could have imagined. We were able to see sights that would have been nearly impossible to see by vehicle or boat. We flew up to the northern portions of the island where we viewed sharp cliffs, revines, wild pigs, waterfalls, ranches, beautiful contrasting green slopes, and of course deep blue ocean shorelines. Unfortunately I am having troubles uploading our pictures to my web server.  So, here are just a few quick shots, but some of the hyperlinks may not work just yet.  We are excited about tomorrow; we will be going to view the active volcano and lava flowing into the adjacent waters.

Hawaii is absolutely amazing! We are living it up here in the tropical landscape. Hawaii….where the air is so dewey sweet you don’t even have to lick a stamp. We are staying at the Outrigger hotel in Kona, on the west side of the Big Island. Today we went snorkeling on the beach in front of the hotel where we saw a plethora of all kinds of amazing tropical fish. Afterwards we went out for a Big Kahuna burger and watched the Ags on the tube. After stomaching the loss we watched another spectacular Kona sunset off the beach. Here are a few teaser shots. We will obviously have numerous additional pics to share later on