Lava Adventures In May 2007 I took my daughter Nicolle to the island of Hawaii for a two-week vacation. We spent our first night in Hawi and then headed to Hilo, where we stayed at the Dolphin Bay Hotel. The hotel’s owner, John Alexander, knows as much about the island’s lava flows as anyone I’ve ever met. If you’d like to read my story about hiking out to the flow in 1997--it was my first time on Big Island and John had referred us to Dutch, the only guide licensed at the time to take people over the lava--click here. Now, ten years later, I had returned. Just a few hours after we had settled in, there was an earthquake. “Did you feel it?” John said, bubbling with excitement. It seems this quake brought the flow of lava from Pu’u O’o above ground. Thank you, Pele! John gave us great advice--put a battery-operated beacon on the top of your car so that you can find it on the way back--and after staying in Hilo for several days, we moved to our beautiful rented cottage near Red Road, had an Ono Burger Deluxe at Verna’s Drive In at Kalapana and then drove up and over the lava that had covered Highway 130 a decade ago. It took about 20 minutes to get to the little parking area and then we hiked for about an hour and fifteen minutes before we saw fresh lava. As the sun set and the moon moved higher in the sky, we could see break out flows all around us. We were so enchanted that we returned the next night, after spending the evening at Uncle Robert’s Awa Bar, also in Kalapana, where Ki’i kept our coconut shell cups full of awa (kava kava) and eventually began to tell us stories of the true Hawaii. In October, a new flow broke open and began moving west, in the direction of Royal Gardens and Kalapana, retracing the path it had taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As it continued moving west, barriers were added and guards posted at the end of Highway 130. Although hundreds of people gather to see it from a distance, the adventure Nicolle and I had is not currently possible.