One cat short of crazy: And Finally........... Volcano Day

The Wifi connection at the hotel was fairly good but had problems uploading pictures, as you know I like to post a lot of pictures, for just one days entry it took overnight to upload. So I decided to wait until I got home to finish off, now frantically trying to get it done in the next hour, the last hour of 2014!

Volcano Day!
Having been too snuffly on Xmas day itself, we headed off to the East side of the island to see the sights on boxing day

As the ground around the volcano is damaged by eruptions, there are holes formed where steam just boils out of the ground, there are a couple with fences round but the rest, the steam just oozes forth like the vent from some sort of underground railway!

Further on up the volcano, we reached the summit which was filled with angry lava a couple of years ago but now was just a steaming hole in the ground

The area where the current lava flow is way off near a small village, its trundling slowly across a road but its not a good idea to go and gawp at people when they are trying to save their houses and posessions so we headed off to see the lava flows from previous eruptions,

Very interesting to see the way the lava had flowed down the mountains and into the sea leaving black trails all the way to the cliffs edge.

The lava was glassy on top but soon weathered to the spongy looking rock underneath .

Driving towards Hilo, I made a joke about following one of the tour buses into a turning, as we went past we noticed it was a Macadamia nut farm so we turned round and followed the coach in after all!

The factory was closed for Xmas but you could see the orchard of nut trees, the equipment they used to harvest and get a look at some of the nuts growing on the trees, well, you couldnt actually, I turned down one of the orchard paths when no one was looking so we could drive up and get a look .