Our Blog - Hawaii 2015 - Days 1 and 2 at Waikaloa Beach

This year, we decided to start our golf season early with a trip to Hawaii. We hadn't been to the islands in over 15 years, so we were pretty much due! This time, we went to the Big Island (the only actually called Hawai'i). It is the largest and southeastern-most of the Hawaiian islands. There are 5 separate shield volcanos that erupted and overlapped each other, with 2 being either dormant or extinct, and 3 which are still active. One of them, Kilauea, has been erupting since 1983 and has been in the news lately for its' lava flows, which are coming close to a few towns on the south-eastern side of the island. More on the volcano's later when we head over to Volcano's National Park.

We landed at night and it was interesting since we were expecting a "tropical island" and ended up on the side of the island which got almost no rain and really had a "moon landscape" ... barren areas where one side of the road was just lava fields and the other side of the road looked like something out of a spaghetti western.

Our first stop was the Waikoloa Resort and our first two rounds of golf: the Beach Course and the Kings course. First up was the Beach Course, designed by Robert Trent Jones, Jr. It was an interesting course since it had a few holes right along the water including the signature 7th hole where the 7th green sits on a lava peninsula.

Here we started out, and you can see the water in the background.

You can see straight in the middle of the picture what the lava fields looked like. Here, they are boulders of lava in huge mounds.

Fairly benign ... no lava!

Here we start going out directly to the water. and you can see the lava fields popping up here and there.

Here I was successful in getting the waves crashing up against the rocks.

The next day was the Kings course, which was designed by Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish. This course was not really along the water as much, but had more lava and seemed to weave through vast lava fields.

Mental note ... no, you can't find your golf ball if it goes into the lava fields!

So we had some company on this course ... a set of goats that were wandering through a couple of the holes.

We also caught 1 more round of golf at a "local" course called Waikoloa Village. This one was unique in that it was up about 1,000 feet of elevation. It is designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr and on a clear day, you are supposed to be able to see all five volcanoes (Kohala, Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, Hualalai, and Haleakala on Maui) as well as the Kohala coastline. No lava and no coastline! Just a nice little parkland course. We did get to see wild turkeys along the fairways, though.

Proceed to Whale Watching