Torrential Downpour

[shannon_a]

Had a very busy day today, and I'm now quite tired. In fact, everyone is except for my step-mom, Mary.

The goal today was to go up and see the north side of the island, which Kimberly and I never have in all of visits to Kauai. So, we headed west, through Lihue, and then Northward. We saw plenty of pretty terrain along the way, and briefly stopped at a lighthouse, but our eventual goal was Princeville.

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Princeville is a gated community/city that looks much more like California than Hawaii. We weren't really there to see the town, though, but rather a hotel, the St. Regis, down by the ocean. The hotel itself is entirely beautiful. A huge 11-story building that runs down the cliffs to the ocean itself. There were large attractive public rooms, lounges, and balconies that we wandered among. The best thing, though, was the view, which is of Hanalei Bay and the majestic mountains on the other side of it. Totally awe inspiring.

We had brunch at the St. Regis. It was quite expensive. The food was quite good, but we were really paying for the view and the atmosphere, which were terrific. Afterward we took pictures until I got cranky, wandered down to look at the beach, then got back into the car.

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Our next destination was the literal End of the Road, where the highway that goes around the north side of Kauai stops. There's a beach that, but we instead were heading to the hiking trail that led up into the mountains. Our goal on the trail was a half-mile out, which would give us a view down the Na Pali Coast, the rugged, undeveloped, and largely unpassable western side of the island.

The hiking path was somewhat rough going. It went up quite a bit and there were lots of areas that were entirely stone, which was slightly slippery, especially since there's been a lot of recent rain and we'd even gotten some sprinkles before we'd ascended the trail. A quarter mile up we hit our first milestone, where there was a beach overlook. Kimberly decided she'd had enough and stayed there, while my dad, Mary and I kept going.

The rest of the trail was easier, but it was still a pretty daunting quarter mile. We walked past a tiny little rivulet with a waterfall behind it, climbed ever higher, and finally got our view of the Na Pali Coast.

I was honestly somewhat underimpressed. You can see the "folds" of land as mountains reach out into the ocean one behind the other, but it was all very distant. We watched for a while, took some pictures, then started heading back down.

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Somewhere along the way, it started raining. Just before we got back to Kimberly, the rain was entirely torrential. It let up for a tiny bit, and we thought we were good, then it started pouring down again. And, when I say pouring, I don't mean that weak-sauce stuff we get in the Bay Area. The rain was really throwing it down, as Kimberly might say. We were soaked almost instantly, and then kept getting wetter and wetter.

The path we were walking became a stream, with water pouring down the rocks and sometimes pooling into sopping wells polls that we stepped through. We were joined by an older woman as we walked, and we hiked down the path together. As I told Kimberly, it felt like we were an unlikely group of travellers, thrown together in the face of a natural disaster. Some of us had even lost family and friends--as the woman's husband had decided to continue heading on (to a waterfall a full 4 miles from the parking lot). I wonder now how he surveyed the deluge.

Fortunately, this is Kauai, and so we weren't particularly cold. But we were wetter than wet. Wetter than I can ever remember being except one day when I got caught in a sudden downpour in London and another when I was still in elementary school and played extensively in some puddles on a rainy day walk home. By the time we got back to the car and I peeled off soaked socks and shoes, I was astounded to see how much mud had collected on them. I was fortunately able to change out of my (entirely soaked) shirt for the (dry) shirt I wear for swimming.

It was a remarkable adventure, it was funny, and it was fun. A once in a lifetime sort of thing.

Because, you know, usually we'd be bright enough to come in from the rain.

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Everything after that was mostly anticlimax. By the time we got back to Hanalei Bay it was sunny again, so we stopped there to swim. I wasn't a huge fan of the area for swimming, because it was very shallow quite a ways out and all turned up sand without fish. My dad said it was good for swimming though, and I agreed. Usually out in the ocean, the waves make it hard to do a proper freestyle, where you breathe in sync with pumping your arms forward. At Hanalei Bay I could do it no problem.

Swimming, of course, got my swimming shirt wet, and I hadn't thought to pack a third shirt for the day. Silly me.

After that, there was the long drive back, a stop at Costco was dinner and lunch food, the return home, dinner, and then finally a shower to get mud and salt off me. And then, as I said, the exhaustion.

Whew, what a day!