![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Hawaii Day #4
Jan. 25th, 2009 07:52 amYesterday was a very busy day.
There's a coffee plantation just a block or two below my dad's house. It's the same plantation that we visited on Friday(?), as it stretches across much of the southwest corner of Kauai. Mary apparently walks down in it with some regularity, so we decided to join her Saturday morning.
(More specifically, we requested the walk.)
So, after breakfast, we walked with her out to the plantation, then walked through the plantation all the way down to the sea. I'd thought it was somewhat sad previously that there was no beach really close to my dad's house, but it turns out the main problem is the plantation blocking the shorefront, as it was only a 2 or 2.5 mile walk down to the water (though not to a beach). The plantation was nice, and it was fun "sneaking" through their pathways.
The walk back was a bit more work, since it was uphill all the way. Kauai is even more a big hillside than Berkeley.
Kauaism #3:
One of the things that always strikes me odd about Kauai is the way that its roads are set up like spokes in a wheel. There's a central road which goes three-quarter of the way around the island (with the northwest being totally inaccessible), and if you want to get from that road to any of the beaches or towns you generally need to drive out on a spoke.
The problem is that most of the spokes don't connect to each other. So, at my dad's house, we're just 3 or 4 miles from Lawai Beach and some of the other beaches west of Poipu, but to get there we actually have to go all the way out to one of the main roads, then back in, for a total of 8 miles or so.
After lunch, we went out to a beach to swim, snorkel and hopefully not burn, as has been our tendency this whole trip. Our beach of choice yesterday was Lydgate, which is on the east side of the island.
The plan was to swim there so that Kimberly could get more comfortable with the water once more, but unfortunately she stayed very nervous, and needed to test her footing and make sure she could stand up every couple of minutes.
Though Lydgate is generally less fishy than some of the other beaches, we did see some interesting ones, including what I think was a Milletseed Butterflyfish--definitely a breed of butterfly fish that I'd never seen before.
Kauaism #4:
I've been shocked by how much development has gone on since our last visit to Kauai, just three years ago. In Poipu especially, they're building hundreds of new houses and two new malls. I also saw some development out by Lihue (and have heard about even more).
Of course all of this work is at a dead stand-still now, with the Bush Economy being what it is. So, there are ghost towns all over, in various stages of completion, and going slowly back to the elements if someone doesn't get their act into gear soon.
The evening was taken up by a huge party. Mary invited over a dozen or so people to celebrate Chinese New Year (a day early). They were a group mostly in their 50s and 60s, and all consisting of Chinese women with Caucasian husbands. They seemed like nice folks, though one of them (Doug) started going off at one point about how "Obama is sure finding now that his campaign promises are hitting harsh reality ... blah blah blah ... socialism ... blah blah blah."
I of course suspect that Obama hasn't hit anything that's surprised him yet, and if history wrote about our great socialist president, that'd have to be Bush with all the buyouts of his dying presidency. But I just bit my tongue and enjoyed the evening. There was much tasty food brought as part of a pot-luck.
And now it's day #5, or at least the morning thereof. I try and stay on Californian time when I'm in Hawaii, but today was the first day when I was genuinelly unwilling to wake up around 7. However when I crawled out of bed around 7.20, I did get to see a crimson red sun just a tiny bit up above the ocean.
Hawaii is certainly pretty.
There's a coffee plantation just a block or two below my dad's house. It's the same plantation that we visited on Friday(?), as it stretches across much of the southwest corner of Kauai. Mary apparently walks down in it with some regularity, so we decided to join her Saturday morning.
(More specifically, we requested the walk.)
So, after breakfast, we walked with her out to the plantation, then walked through the plantation all the way down to the sea. I'd thought it was somewhat sad previously that there was no beach really close to my dad's house, but it turns out the main problem is the plantation blocking the shorefront, as it was only a 2 or 2.5 mile walk down to the water (though not to a beach). The plantation was nice, and it was fun "sneaking" through their pathways.
The walk back was a bit more work, since it was uphill all the way. Kauai is even more a big hillside than Berkeley.
Kauaism #3:
One of the things that always strikes me odd about Kauai is the way that its roads are set up like spokes in a wheel. There's a central road which goes three-quarter of the way around the island (with the northwest being totally inaccessible), and if you want to get from that road to any of the beaches or towns you generally need to drive out on a spoke.
The problem is that most of the spokes don't connect to each other. So, at my dad's house, we're just 3 or 4 miles from Lawai Beach and some of the other beaches west of Poipu, but to get there we actually have to go all the way out to one of the main roads, then back in, for a total of 8 miles or so.
After lunch, we went out to a beach to swim, snorkel and hopefully not burn, as has been our tendency this whole trip. Our beach of choice yesterday was Lydgate, which is on the east side of the island.
The plan was to swim there so that Kimberly could get more comfortable with the water once more, but unfortunately she stayed very nervous, and needed to test her footing and make sure she could stand up every couple of minutes.
Though Lydgate is generally less fishy than some of the other beaches, we did see some interesting ones, including what I think was a Milletseed Butterflyfish--definitely a breed of butterfly fish that I'd never seen before.
Kauaism #4:
I've been shocked by how much development has gone on since our last visit to Kauai, just three years ago. In Poipu especially, they're building hundreds of new houses and two new malls. I also saw some development out by Lihue (and have heard about even more).
Of course all of this work is at a dead stand-still now, with the Bush Economy being what it is. So, there are ghost towns all over, in various stages of completion, and going slowly back to the elements if someone doesn't get their act into gear soon.
The evening was taken up by a huge party. Mary invited over a dozen or so people to celebrate Chinese New Year (a day early). They were a group mostly in their 50s and 60s, and all consisting of Chinese women with Caucasian husbands. They seemed like nice folks, though one of them (Doug) started going off at one point about how "Obama is sure finding now that his campaign promises are hitting harsh reality ... blah blah blah ... socialism ... blah blah blah."
I of course suspect that Obama hasn't hit anything that's surprised him yet, and if history wrote about our great socialist president, that'd have to be Bush with all the buyouts of his dying presidency. But I just bit my tongue and enjoyed the evening. There was much tasty food brought as part of a pot-luck.
And now it's day #5, or at least the morning thereof. I try and stay on Californian time when I'm in Hawaii, but today was the first day when I was genuinelly unwilling to wake up around 7. However when I crawled out of bed around 7.20, I did get to see a crimson red sun just a tiny bit up above the ocean.
Hawaii is certainly pretty.
