Hapuna Beach - widely considered one of the best on the Big Island, for swimming, surfing or snorkeling.  Mom, Jonathan and Cindy found the surf a little high for swimming but Steve rode those waves like a rocking chair!

Not bad, as beaches go - but many more to be discovered

An unmarked, but obviously well known surfing beach on the west side of the island - took a bit of a hike to get to but showed there was more to come

Of course, we had to do some research to decide which beach would become our wedding site - Kuki'o beach was one of the ones we considered, very dramatic with it's crashing surf...

But this was the one we chose in the end: Holohokai Beach Park, also on the island's west coast

 

Yup... this one will do nicely!

Kahalu'u Beack Park is snorkeling heaven - just a few miles south of Kona, protected by a coral reef, and packed with all kinds of fish as well as green sea turtles.   For our first time snorkeling ever, we were treated to one of the best shallow-reef snorkeling spots in the world!

On our last day, after checking out of the timeshare and with hours to kill before our evening flight back to LA, we picked up some takeout sushi and headed on a beach crawl, starting with Old Airport Beach Park, by the side of the old Kona airport runway

We then headed up to 'Anaeho'omalu Bay (aka A-Bay), another one of the island's most popular beaches that we hadn't yet checked out

Aaah, the sun, the sand, the palm trees....

And then the sun started to set...

... and it was time to go back to the cold north!