JOHN vs. CATHLEEN & THE VOLCANO

"You doing the waterfall hike? Awesome! You'll love it. See you there!"

They head off, tossing a coconut down the beach like a football. Where the sand ends, beneath the cliffs, is a patch of grass, and we stop where Tay and Lara did to don our shoes. Set on the grass like a blooming flower is a freshly peeled guava surrounded by a half-dozen wedges of coconut. (Remember that next time someone starts giving L.A. a bad rap.) The trail back into the valley takes us through dark forest, then loamy land replete with exotic flowers and fruit trees. Ripe guava and passion fruit drop at our feet.

Spaced along this Alice-in-Wonderland route are a handful of dwellings -- including more than one family treehouse -- along with tumbledown shacks and a couple of farm homes with well-tended gardens.

The trail ends at an idyllic jungle pool fed by a 20-foot waterfall. Our new friends are nowhere in sight, but I hear the faint murmur of voices coming from . . . above the waterfall?

Preggo stays behind (wet-rock scrambling being a known fall risk) while I clamber up the falls to another pool. No people but -- aha! -- yet another falls. Two more levels up I find Tay and Lara (clothed, since you asked), frolicking in a pool. Tay is delighted. "What'd I tell you! Cool, huh?" I climb up under the falls, plant my butt on a rock and let the pounding water massage my shoulders.

By Jeep, Bike and Foot

If we can't go to the volcano (and I haven't given up yet), we'll at least go to a volcano. A half-hour west of Waipio, we pull into the town of Waimea, which sits at 2,600 feet above sea level, just below the north slope of the 13,796-foot Mauna Kea volcano. Trade winds are raking a steady stream of clouds between the colossal peak and the Kohala Mountains, lime-green hills north of Waimea.

Mauna Kea is dormant, but that doesn't mean we can't coax some fun out of it. We rent mountain bikes in town, toss 'em in the Jeep and head up.

Just beyond a modest neighborhood are miles of cattle-dotted ranchland, most of it past or current parcels of Parker Ranch, where today's quietude belies a colorful history.

The short version: In the 1790s, Hawaiian king gets cattle, wants more, orders a 10-year kapu (ban) on cattle killing. Herd gets out of hand, taking over hillsides and goring passersby. King calls in marksman John Parker, from Massachusetts, who thins herd, keeps some animals for himself, marries king's granddaughter and starts what eventually became the largest privately owned cattle ranch in the United States. (It peaked at 225,000 acres.)

Waimea is a different Hawaii -- locals in jeans and flannel shirts mosey about in the cool, hilly setting, amid ranch-themed stores and restaurants -- but you're never far from the stereotype: carloads of salty wave rats, surfboards strapped atop, bounce by, to or from sessions on the nearby coasts. We rise along Mana Road, a lonely dirt track that wraps halfway around Mauna Kea. The early miles are as green and misty as the Irish countryside, but after 15 minutes we bust through the top of the clouds, somewhere around 4,000 feet, and into startling sunlight. To the west, beyond the clouds, we see the sun-baked Kohala coast. Above us, the volcano summit and its stark white observation domes stand out against a crystalline blue sky.

There isn't another soul in sight. We park the Jeep and pedal uphill on a dirt road into the steady trade winds, taking lots of rest stops. Below us, fog rolls into the expansive grassy slopes, demarcated by barbed wire and cut by oh-so-tempting (but off-limits) single-track trails.

The scenery up here is so wide and unchanging that it's hard to perceive progress, as if we're ants crawling across a movie screen. Then, in the eastern distance past the cloud band, we glimpse the ocean and realize we've been riding for 90 minutes and are starting to wrap around Mauna Kea's east flank.