Where Expectations Get Quietly Exceeded
A Bucket List Trip, Powered by AI | Part Three
Earlier this year, I planned a bucket list vacation with the help of AI… a 25th anniversary trip five years in the making. This is Part 3 of a six-part series about planning, adventure, manta rays, and learning to think out loud with a machine. Start from the beginning here.
Photo: View from Saddle Road heading toward Hilo.
We landed in Kona around 2 p.m., picked up our rental Ford Explorer, and started the drive east across Saddle Road.
Saddle Road cuts straight across the middle of the Big Island between two massive volcanoes: Mauna Kea to the north, Mauna Loa to the south. For most of the drive, you’re surrounded by barren lava fields that stretch in every direction, black and rust-colored rock as far as you can see. It looks like Mars.
Then you crest a ridge, and the landscape starts to shift. Green appears. Trees. Clouds hanging low over the hills. It gets greener as you go, but it’s not until you turn off the main road into Volcano that it hits you… thick, lush, impossibly green rainforest pressing in from all sides.
We’d been awake for nearly twenty hours, running on airport coffee and tea and the adrenaline of finally being here. Volcano is barely a town… a handful of restaurants, a gas station, a brewery, and not much else. We turned off the main road onto a tree-lined street, then into a gravel lot tucked back from the road. A gravel path led us deeper into the property toward the office.
The Volcano Village Lodge sat at the end of that path, tucked into the forest like it had grown there.
Photos: Volcano Village Lodge path to office & Nicole and me wearing our leis.
A woman greeted us at the main office with leis… fresh flowers draped over our shoulders… and led us up a path through the trees to our cabin.
I thought I’d booked a room.
Turns out I’d booked an entire cabin.
When I reserved the “Kilauea,” I assumed it was a class of room, like booking a “deluxe king” at a hotel chain. But there were only five cabins on the entire property, each one named after a different volcano. We had the Kilauea cabin. Just us. Surrounded by rainforest.
She opened the door and handed us the key.
Three walls of the cabin were almost entirely glass. Beyond them: rainforest so dense you couldn’t see or hear anything beyond it. No neighboring properties. No roads. No signs of civilization. Just thick green foliage pressing in from every direction, creating a cocoon of complete privacy.
There was a king bed facing the windows. A gas fireplace. A mini fridge, coffee maker, teapot, and microwave tucked into a corner. The room itself was rustic… clean and comfortable. But that wasn’t the point. The point was the view, the atmosphere, the feeling of being wrapped in rainforest. And scattered around the property, quiet spots to wander… cushioned chairs, porch swings, places to sit and disappear into the trees.
Photos: Views and amenities at the Volcano Village Lodge.
Nicole walked straight to the windows and just stood there.
“This is unreal.”
I opened the fridge. Inside: a homemade frittata wrapped in foil, a fresh fruit plate with pineapple and papaya, and orange juice.
No packaged sandwich. No sad continental breakfast. Actual homemade food left for us like we were staying at someone’s home.
The bed had electric mattress warmers… two separate controls so we could each set our own temperature. There was a basket with trail snacks and a flashlight in case we wanted to walk the grounds after dark.
Everything about this place exceeded expectations in quiet, thoughtful ways.
Score one for ChatGPT. This was the lodge it had recommended early on, and I’d just gone with it. No overthinking, no second-guessing. And it nailed it.
We went to sleep that night to the sound of frogs. Woke up the next morning to birds singing and soft light filtering through the trees.
Photos: Scenes from our 15 mile hike through Volcanoes National Park.
Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park is two miles from the lodge.
We spent two full days there, hiking just over fifteen miles total across landscapes that felt like walking on another planet.
The Crater Rim Trail follows the edge of Kilauea’s caldera, over two miles wide, with steam vents hissing along the path. The ground is warm in spots where heat from below breaks through. And in the distance, you can see the evidence of the most recent eruption, which had started and ended just two days before we arrived. The lava lake was cooling, still glowing faintly at night, but during the day it just looked like fresh black rock.
The highlight, though, was the Kīlauea Iki Trail.
Kīlauea Iki means “Little Kilauea,” and it’s a smaller crater formed during a 1959 eruption. The trail descends through rainforest, switchbacking down the crater wall until you reach the floor… a solidified lava lake nearly a mile across.
Walking across it feels surreal. The ground is uneven, cracked, jagged in places. You follow cairns, which are stacks of rocks that mark the trail across the blackened surface.
And all around the edges of the crater, the rainforest has started reclaiming the land. Ferns grow in crevices. Small trees push up through the lava. It’s this strange, beautiful contrast… life slowly taking back what the volcano destroyed.
We stopped in the middle of the crater and just stood there. No one else around. Just us, the rock, and the quiet knowledge that we were standing on what had been molten earth just decades ago.
Nicole looked at me. “This is worth it.”
I knew she wasn’t just talking about the hike.
All day long, we kept seeing signs about the nēnē, Hawaii’s state bird, endangered and protected. *Please don’t feed the nēnē. Watch for nēnē crossing.* We hadn’t seen one yet.
So every bird we spotted, I pulled out my phone, snapped a photo, and uploaded it to ChatGPT. *What is this?*
Kalij pheasant.
We kept walking.
This became our rhythm. One of us would spot something… a bright flower, an unusual plant, a bird we didn’t recognize… and I’d take a photo and ask. The answers came back fast.
Red anthurium.
White anthurium.
Kahili ginger.
Bamboo orchid.
We were learning the rainforest whether we meant to or not.
Then, walking back to the car after one of the hikes, Nicole spotted a cluster of birds on the grass that looked different. Stocky. Goose-like. I pulled up my phone, snapped the photo, uploaded it.
Nēnē (Hawaiian goose). Hawaii’s state bird.
We stood there grinning like we’d won something.
It wasn’t about collecting facts. It was about feeding curiosity the moment it showed up. See something. Wonder about it. Know. And then notice more because of it.
Photos: Lunch and snacks in the park.
The lodge packed us lunch both days… ham and turkey sandwiches, water, guava drinks, trail mix, and cookies in a reusable insulated bag. That first day, we found a picnic table under the trees and ate while comparing notes on what we’d seen so far… the best views, the weirdest steam vents, how our legs were already feeling the miles.
On the second day, after we’d hiked the Thurston Lava Tube and the short Devastation Trail, we drove down to the coast on the Chain of Craters Road. This is where I remembered the GuideAlong app.
I’d used it years ago at Yellowstone… an audio tour that plays through your car speakers and tells you what you’re seeing as you drive using GPS. I pulled it up on my phone, saw they had a Big Island tour, and bought it on the spot.
As we drove, a voice narrated the landscape through the car speakers: how the lava flows reached the ocean, why certain areas were roped off, where to stop for petroglyphs carved into the rock centuries ago. It was the kind of tool that made you notice things you would’ve driven right past, but it didn’t control the experience. We stopped where we wanted. Skipped what didn’t interest us. Paused the audio when we wanted quiet.
It was everything a tour bus isn’t. We got the context without giving up the freedom.
Photos: Stops along the Crater Rim Drive.
We stopped at the petroglyphs and hiked a short, hot trail over jagged lava rock to see these ancient carvings… simple figures etched into stone by people who lived here long before any of this became a national park.
Then we drove down to the coast, where black lava meets turquoise water. It was too windy to sit outside comfortably, so we ate our packed lunch in the car, windows cracked, watching the waves crash against the rocks.
On the way back, we stopped at the Volcano House… the historic lodge inside the park that sits right on the rim of the caldera. ChatGPT had mentioned it as one of the lodging options early on. We grabbed a couple of beers and sat in the bar with a direct view into the crater.
The views were stunning. The beer was cold. But the place had clearly seen better days… a hotel that happened to be on the rim of a volcano but felt past its prime. I was glad we’d picked the lodge instead… a place that felt like it belonged in the forest, not just near it.
Our last night in Volcano, we had dinner at the Thai Thai Bistro & Bar, a little spot in town.
That night, back at the cabin, I pulled out my phone and opened ChatGPT.
We’d be leaving Volcano in the morning, heading to our resort on the Kohala Coast. The question was: which route? The southern route was faster, straight across the island, back through the lava fields. The northern route went through Hilo and up the coast, but added time and stops.
I asked ChatGPT: *Is Hilo worth it?*
It laid out both options. The southern route: efficient, familiar terrain. The northern route: Rainbow Falls, Akaka Falls, scenic lookouts along the Hamakua Coast, a different side of the island.
It recommended north.
I told it we wanted to arrive at the resort by 4:30 and what time we’d be leaving Volcano. I also mentioned we’d want lunch on the water if there was a good option in Hilo.
It built the day: Rainbow Falls first (quick stop, right in Hilo), then lunch at a spot on the bay, up the Hamakua Coast to Akaka Falls (short hike, worth the detour), with a couple of scenic lookouts flagged along the way.
Clean. Flexible. Enough structure to follow, enough space to skip things if they didn’t feel right.
I saved the plan and put my phone down. Tomorrow would be different… more movement, more stops, less quiet. But I was ready for it.
We went to bed that night full, tired, and grateful.
The next morning, our anniversary, we reheated one last frittata and ate it at the small table overlooking the rainforest. Twenty-five years. We didn’t say much about it. Didn’t need to. The trip itself was the thing we were saying to each other.
We packed our things and stood on the deck for a few minutes just looking out at the trees.
Three nights wasn’t long enough. But it was exactly what we needed… a quiet, grounding start to the trip before we transitioned to the coast.
We loaded the car and headed north toward Hilo. I didn’t know exactly what was coming next, just that it would be different. Volcano had been quiet, grounding, exactly what we needed. Now we were heading toward the coast, toward people and activity and the second half of the trip. I was ready for it. But I was also glad we’d started here, in the trees, with nothing to prove and nowhere else to be.
Next: Part 4 – I Had No Idea What We’d Signed Up For