Today Barry was being sent back to the mainland, so before he left we decided to do something very “Hawaii”, and give him something great to remember the island by. I’m not sure what is more “Hawaii” than volcanic lava flows…so that’s where we went. Unfortunately the lava viewing is officially in the evening, and there isn’t a lot of red hot stuff to be seen during the day, just a lot of billowing steam, according to some of the people we asked, but we decided to try anyways, in the hopes that the locals were wrong….they weren’t. We didn’t see any molten hot stuff exactly, but it was still pretty risky business….considering we completely ignored about 8 different DANGER signs prohibiting us from going where we were going. We were walking on brand new…or at least fairly new land…still soft, still super unstable….still hot. We ran into a guy who apparently lives on the lava field….weird….and we asked him if it was ok to be where we were….he rattled off about 10 different dangerous things that could happen, ranging from sulfur fumes to fiberglass gasses, to cave-ins….then he said…. “Well, have fun!” So the crazy live on lava guy seemed to think we were ok, so we ventured further…funny how my biggest fear was getting arrested, and not getting burned to a crisp by the hot steam, or the gooey molten rock…..hmmmmm?? So we walked along the restricted area for a bit….I was able to collect some lava rocks to give as souvenirs (sorry if you were hoping for a dashboard hula dancer :)) Then those “this is kind of a bad idea” voices in our heads started screaming at us, so we decided to leave…one of our smarter moves I’d say. We got in the car and listened to Johnny cash sing about the Ring of fire, and Jimmy Buffet sing about Volcanoes. I thought about what a neat experience I had. To be walking over such new, fresh, rock was pretty cool… I felt lucky to be able to experience something that few people get to….seems to be somewhat of a theme for the trip.