Pololu Valley Hike, Hawaiian Pancakes, & Shelter Dog Field Trip | Big Island Day 3

All right let's dig into this monstrosity. We have a special guest joining us today and this is Bucky. Good morning. It's another beautiful day here on the big island. We left the Kona area this morning. We're now in Waimea and we're going to explore the more northern part of the island. Go on a little hike, check out some viewpoints. Should be really fun. Yep but first, always first is coffee. We're tired. For coffee we came to Waimea Coffee Company and we're just kind of keeping it boring this morning. I got a way too hot french press here but it smells delicious and an americano. Which I put way too much half and half in because it came barreling out of the thing and I was not expecting that but it's really smooth and creamy and delicious. This shop is in a cool little location. It's probably really old looking. It's like a little u-shaped courtyard here and they have shops along the side and they have like an artist over there. There's a dentist there. So in case you need to get your teeth cleaned while you're in Hawaii. But they have a nice little outdoor seating area for the coffee shop as well as some seats inside. It's really nice and cute on the inside. It's very wooden kind of old school like Hawaiian type feel. They also serve food but we are going to save our appetites because we're about to have ourselves a nice little Hawaiian breakfast. For breakfast we came to Hawaiian Style Cafe. I was actually dreaming about this all night actually because of this thing here. It's like twice the size of your head. Yeah this thing is so this is a banana macadamia nut pancake. I'm going to destroy that here in a second. But my other favorite part about this meal is this is like one of my favorite breakfast combos. So these are the best hash browns. The crispy on the outside mushy on the inside but then you take the egg and you put it on top and you cut it up and you mix it together and it's the best. And then you can't come to Hawaii without getting the Portuguese sauces and they make this here right? In-house. These are in-house Portuguese sauces. This is a spicy one. All right let's dig into this monstrosity. That's what dreams are made of. That's so good. Okay I had to wave the white flag. I admit defeat. I couldn't couldn't finish it. Half of it's my fault. Yeah half of this is yeah but uh half of it's mine. So as we promised at the end of our last vlog we have a special guest joining us today and this is Bucky. Oh my gosh my new best friend Bucky. He's very excited. Bucky's very excited. So something we learned about on Maui is that you can take shelter dogs out on a field trip and we've always wanted to do it we just never had the time. So I made sure that on this trip we could take a dog out on a field trip so we came to the Hawaii. I'm out of breath. These dogs are a lot of energy. We came to the Hawaii Island Humane Society in Waimea and we're taking little Bucky out for a hike and a really fun day. I've already almost cried about five times seeing all the dogs so this is like the best idea ever but also the worst idea ever. Oh my goodness do you want to go on a field trip? Let's go come on. All right we brought Bucky on his field trip to Pololu Valley. There's an overlook here where you park at and then you hike down to a little beach area. It's a 1.2 mile round trip and about a four to five hundred foot elevation gain and loss. The drive over here was gorgeous. So we drove from Waimea and you take this road and it kind of felt like the road to Hana at times. It was kind of windy there was some farmland there was just beautiful scenery of the ocean and then you drive up to the lookout point and there's all of a sudden all these beautiful cliffs and there's this beautiful like valley with ridges. It's like bam right there. Yeah it is gorgeous over here. I think I've been most excited to explore the next few days of our trip a lot more the nature-y type stuff versus the beach and this is just getting me extra pumped and to have Bucky with us. Oh I can't stop smiling about having Bucky with us. It's so much fun just having him in the car. He slept on my lap almost the whole drive. I love him so much. This swing is sketchy. So this area is home to the Kohala volcano which is the oldest of the five volcanoes on the big island and it last erupted about 120,000 years ago but many hundreds of thousands of years before that there was a massive landslide and part of the volcano fell into the ocean which is why there are all these awesome cliffs in this area right here. Yeah it's a big pretty big beautiful beach. It's got black sand. There's not a lot of people out here so you can kind of spread out kind of do your own thing. It's not your typical come down and lay out type of beach but man it's really cool. The waves are crashing in. You got the cliffs over there. Cliffs behind you. There's this valley with this river. I'm not really sure like a sort of water feature. Yeah we're not sure if the water is like coming from the mountains or if it's the ocean water going up but it's beautiful. This is a really gorgeous spot. It's free to access. It's close to some other really cool spots on the island so definitely check it out. I love it. It's and I think Bucky loves it. Yeah. So Bucky's enjoying the sand. Bucky does not enjoy the ocean we've learned but that's okay. I think he's still enjoying it. Yeah he's having a good time. It is all uphill going up and very hot so bring a lot of water. Absolutely dripping. It's a scorcher today. Oh my god we are so soaked. I was feeling famous from our hike and very hot so I got myself three shave ices. Just kidding. They're not all for me but we're at a place called Original Big Island Shave Ice. It's a little food truck I guess is what you could call it. It's parked in different spots different days of the week so today it's in this one spot but check their website. They have where it'll be on what day. We got three between all four of us and I had to take a photo because they're very unique and interesting. So this one right here is my parents and it looks incredible. It's called the Trini Chantilly. It has like mac nut ice cream, chocolate shave ice, condensed cream, chantilly drizzle, whipped cream, and chopped mac nuts. And then this one's mine. It's called the No Lonnie's and I actually didn't take a photo of what it actually said it was but I know it has mango shave ice, it has coconut ice cream, there's a condensed milk, some sort of goop on top that looks really good. And then this one is Adam's which we are sharing all of these. It's the Kim Ross special. It has ube ice cream, coconut shave ice, coconut topping, and mochi. Looks good. We've never had ube before so I'm excited to try this. Bucky's trying to steal the shave ice. It's no longer sunny shave ice weather. We just had that hot hike and we were drenched in sweat so this sounded really good at the time but now it's like overcast and a little breezy and it's kind of cold. It's always shave ice weather though. It's excellent flavor though. Is it soft? Oh yeah, it's like a cloud. Get that ube. I'm going for the ube. It's purple. Oh cool. Potato-licious, I don't know. Well we had to drop our boy Bucky back off at the shelter. It's a sad time right now. It was really hard. I knew it would be hard but someone 100% was cutting onions back there and made it even harder for me and just seeing him back in his little cage made me really sad. And I knew I'd get attached and I knew this would be a hard thing to do but it was also a very rewarding thing to do. Just getting to take him out of the shelter for a day and show him a fun time that he may not get normally just give him tons of cuddles and love. So I'm heartbroken but I also feel very happy that I had my time with Bucky. Yeah, it was definitely worth it. Take him out. It was fun having him on the hike. You know, get him some exercise. Get him some exposure to like the real world and then when you drop him off you leave some notes about how the trip was and like for someone who's going to take him maybe on another field trip or hopefully someone who's going to adopt him. So yeah, it's a really neat program and like we said earlier we believe all the islands have it so if you're coming to Hawaii check it out. You know, spend just a couple hours taking them somewhere really cool on the island that you want to experience and then they get to experience it too. And if you live on the big island and you're looking for a friend, I'm hoping Bucky's not available by the time this video gets posted and but if he is please come adopt him. He's the sweetest dog and if he's not there were tons of other cute dogs there and I'm sure the other locations have great dogs so give them a home since I can't. So even though our day with Bucky is unfortunately over, our day is not over yet. We have one more adventure we're going to go on if the weather holds up for us. Our final stop of the day is Waipio Valley Lookout and similar to the Polalu Valley that we were at earlier, it's just down the coastline from it. It has a very similar view of the cliffs and a beach below but it's down farther and it's looking the other direction so we were trying to debate should we go to one or the other or both and we chose both and I'm glad we did because while they are kind of similar they are slightly different and you can't get enough of these beautiful Hawaii views. No way. So if you're short on time you can park your car and hop out and just check it out from the overlook or you can hike down the steep road down to it or drive down to it. Yeah so the road down if you want to drive is four-wheel drive only so keep that in mind. We just saw a jeep go up and it's one way so you have to like move out of each other's way if you want to drive down there and if you walk down there you're walking down where the cars are so also keep that in mind. So we think a storm is about to roll in. I heard thunder, I saw lightning, I think I felt a few raindrops so I don't think we're going to go down to the bottom but the view from the lookout is top notch. Yeah if you could only do that if you only have a few minutes to spare. I mean the drive to get this to get to this takes a little bit of time but if you only have a few minutes to spend here the lookout is still worth checking out. We're going to continue our drive because we're now headed to our Airbnb in Hilo which is where we'll be staying for the rest of our trip but we're going to take it easy tonight so it's the end of today's vlog but tomorrow we're going to explore the town of Hilo, eat some tasty stuff, check out some waterfalls. It should be a really really fun day so we'll see you then. Good morning. Howdy neighbors. All right we brought Bucky. You want to sit? You want to sit? Sit. Sit. I love you.