Hawaii Tropical Botanical Garden and an Unpleasant Surprise

After our horseback ride in Waipio Valley, we had a short drive to Hilo, where the Botanical Gardens we wanted to visit were located. We got a bit lost trying to find it since it seems nowhere in Hawaii has a physical address to input into a GPS. All the directions are something like: "Make a slight right onto the road with the two flashing lights, pass mile marker 11.2, and turn up the driveway with the banana trees on either side."

The botanical gardens were definitely beautiful, but since I don't know much about plants or trees, all the gorgeous flowers started to look the same, even if they were different colors and shapes. My favorite section was the orchid area of course.

Because I know nothing about any of the flowers and plants pictured below, I'm pretty much going to be skipping captions on them. Also, if you're not a fan of pretty flower pictures, skip ahead because the unpleasant surprise is still yet to come.

Front entrance sign.

Me and Eden reading about the statue of the Hawaiian god

Mom on the bridge down into the garden. It starts out level, but then you go down a lot of stairs, which are not fun on the way back up and out of the gardens. When we left, I felt like I had just taken a shower because I was that sweaty. 

I'm pretty sure this one is called beehive ginger. They also had these flowers for sale at many of the farmer's markets.

Of course there were geckos!

There was a bird area with a cage that had a few macaws in it. This red guy here liked to talk.

At the end of the trail downwards, you hit the ocean and can read about the legends of the rock formations and how they got that way.

Eden doing some reading.

I appreciated the botanical gardens for their beauty and all the plant life they contained, but I can't say I wasn't thankful to get back into the air conditioned car. Plus we had ridden horses all morning and then taken a mile and a half hike around the gardens with a lot of steps at the end of the trail, so I was beat and ready to go back to the hotel and take a shower. Turns out, that was not in the cards.

Eden wanted to check out Hilo since it was only a mile or so down the road, so on our way there, Mom stopped at an intersection to let a pedestrian cross. We heard a terrifying screeching of tires and everything seemed to go in slow motion like it does in the movies when something traumatic happens. BAM! We were rear-ended by a pickup and the rental car was pushed through the intersection.

Poor rental car. Simply not drivable anymore and not our fault. 

Eden was in the back seat and bore the brunt of the impact, but it seemed that everybody was OK aside from being very shaken up. I had never been in any sort of collision of that nature before and I just couldn't believe our bad luck. Luckily, Mom had purchased the additional insurance through the rental company, so we were fully covered.

All of our phones were dead, so we didn't really have any way to communicate with the rental company, tow truck, or insurance agents. Luckily for us, the man who hit us was a gentleman and loaned his phone to make calls. He even drove Mom to the Hilo airport to get a new rental car because we still had two hours to drive to get back to the hotel. Me and Eden stayed on the side of the road with the broken car until the tow truck came and it was really funny because we had no way to communicate with Mom to know if she had contacted the tow truck and we were supposed to ride to the airport with him or what was going on. The tow truck dude was also very nice to us and made some calls and found out that we had to wait just a bit longer because Mom was on her way back with a new car.

That's the tow truck driving away with the crashed rental car. At least Eden and I had a grassy area on the side of the road to hang out on.

So, once again, we had a THIRD rental car on the island. I could hardly believe we had gone through three cars in under a week! Our luck was so bad that I could only laugh at the situation because there's really nothing else you can do in a situation that bad.

We all had some much-needed alcohol when we got back to the hotel. And I got my hot shower. What a rough day.

Until next time!