Three Saturdays and a Flight
Jul. 30th, 2021 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aTruth to tell, the flight wasn't mine. I drove my dad and Mary out to the airport three weeks ago, and then picked them up on Monday. They were out in San Jose seeing my sister and her husband and their new granddaughter.
That would be the first time I've driven anyone to airport (and back). It was delightful to give a little something back after decades of being driven to the airport myself.
It was also the first time that Kimberly and I have been without family on the island since we moved here, and in fact since our first trip on 2001. Which was weird to realize.
But all is returned to normal now, and life is back on its new normal track, with gaming over at their house of course planned for Sunday.
There were three Saturdays while they were away, and as Saturday is usually my restful day away, I was off to three different locales.
(I say restful, but I usually go out somewhere, get some exercise, and do some writing too.)
First Saturday was out at Mahaulepu, my go-to spot for a thoughtless Saturday trip. It's the Tilden of Hawaii for me. (I used to be able to walk straight up into the hills from our house in Berkeley, and on my easy/thoughtless trips there, I'd walk north until I hit Tilden and the drop down to get to the bus stop. It was a 10+ mile one-way trip with a ride back. And no thinking or planning required.)
I usually walk to Mahaulepu from Poipu, Shipwreck Beach, or somewhere in-between, depending on how early or late my morning is going.
Anyway, so I did my typical walk, and then ate lunch out at Mahaulepu and wrote and edited for a while.
Unfortunately, I had a very unwelcome interruption while out there. It turns out that some capitalist scumbags called Kauai ATV have decided that Mahaulepu is a great place for Disneyland style tours, so while I was there, two guides with 20-30 unruly tourists came shouting into the usually (somewhat) quiet area, stopped right in the area I was lunching, and then the main guide watched as his bad-tourists raced off to taunt the nearby tortoises. A second "guide" literally huddled under the bridge while this was happening. When the tourists returned, one even sat down at the table across from me, not giving me my six feet (and not wearing a mask).
Now don't get me wrong. There are tourists on the island. Since we unwisely lifted our COVID quarantines, there have been lots of tourists on the island. I've seen many of them at Mahaulepu. I've often given them directions to the tortoises and the beach. I often tell them that no I don't have wifi, and yes it is a beautiful office. I've exchanged pleasantries with the totally appropriate, respectful, and well-run horseback tours out of the local ranch, both with the tour guides and the tourists.
But there's a big difference between a family of 2-8, a quiet and respectful tour of 10-15 riders, and a large and unruly group of 20-30 who weren't under any sort of control. That tour group was entirely inappropriate for the area.
Afterward I did some bitching on a Kauai Rants FB group, and everyone there was *shocked* to hear about the organized tours at Mahaulepu. Someone pointed me to a Mahaulepu Preservation society, and so I noted the concern to them, and they were *shocked*. They pointed me to the people who run the cave at Mahaulepu and plant all the native plants and take care of the tortoises, and they knew who the tourist group was, and clearly weren't thrilled with them already, and so asked me to file a complaint with Grove Farm who owns the area. So I complained to Grove Farm, and they said they would send an admonition on to Kauai ATV. It won't stop the Disneyland tours, I'm sure, but maybe they'll be better controlled in the future or at least terrorize the tortoises less and trample less native vegetation. Oh, and I should note Grove Farm also lied to me, or at least heavily misrepresented the truth, by saying how thrilled the cave people were about these tours because they were getting some smidgeon of money from it, and overprivileged tourists could make themselves feel better by planting a tree. Having talked to the cave people, I knew this was a lie.
(And I certainly would not have gone to all this trouble of contacting people on my own, but at every stage, I kept hearing "So-and-so will want to know" or "You can help us by telling this to so-and-so." So I did.)
Oh, and if it weren't clear, the tourists weren't in ATVs. That's the other part of the tour. Then they let them all roam free in a mob before hopping into different ATVs.
Sadly, I haven't been back to Mahaulepu since I saw it overrun that Saturday. But I've been adjusting my expectations about our island for three months now. I'm never, ever going to see Mahaulepu so quiet and pleasant as I did when we were in the first year of the pandemic, and our government pretended it cared more about us than the tourists. And now I'm apparently not going to see it without it Disneyland tours going by at top volume and overrunning the picnic area for a while. So we'll see how that goes when I return tomorrow.
Second Saturday was a trip to Kekaha. This is pretty much the end of the road going clockwise, before you get to The Base (PMRF). Dad had showed me the beach once, and I've driven through some of the town a few times on the way to Koke'e (it's on one of the two roads up there), but I'd never really explored it.
I took my bike out, with the intent of biking around Kekaha and maybe Waimea too. I ended up doing just several miles, because it was hot and dry.
I hung out much of the day at the beach at Kekaha. It's pretty windblown and desolate, but there are nice, shaded pavilions, so it was a nice place to write, right on the beach. It was also mostly empty, with just a few (large) local groups out there BBQing on the beach. No tourists. A nice antidote to the Disneyland tourists at Mahaulepu, though while out there I read an article about how some entrepreneur wants to open a huge wave pool right in Kekaha. I can't imagine the county will allow that to happen, but boy it would screw with our traffic if it did, to have a huge tourist attraction out on the backend of the island, and boy it would murder that little community, which is actually a local community, because it's so far from the airport.
After the beach, I biked partway out to PMRF, and decided it was too hot to go that far, then biked around the neighborhoods a bit, and was fascinated by a huge abandoned sugar mill with a towering smoke stack. That was the heart of the town from 1898-2000. Sad to see it rotting away now, but that's the story across Hawaii. I think the coffee plantation and the rum company are some of the few actual production facilities left on this island.
Third Saturday was a trip to the biking trail out on the east side, in Kapaa. I was a bit hesitant about going out there because contraflow has been a nightmare since they started doing road expansion in Kapaa earlier this year, and I hadn't been out there since they expanded contraflow back to Saturdays.
I should explain: a lack of road infrastructure is one of the great sins of Kauai. Since the island started being more welcoming to tourists, I'm not sure when, the population has more than doubled, and the road system has just barely changed. Much of the island is constrained by a highway that's one lane in each direction. So that's problematic. In Kapaa, they're very lucky to have three lanes, two north and one south ... but in the morning most of the traffic is coming from the north. So for decades they've had contraflow where every day they drop down cones in the morning to eat up one of the northbound lanes (and some of the turn lanes) to create a second southbound lane, and then in the late morning or early afternoon, they pick them up.
But the road construction has been playing havoc with that, because when they're contraflowing, they're now having to block a lefthand turn into the Wailua Homesteads, a major residential area, and so any time anyone needs to turn into the Homesteads ... all of the northbound traffic has to wait until they can get across two lanes of rush-hour traffic. Not good.
So I wasn't sure if I wanted to go out to the biking trail Saturday morning, but I looked at the traffic in the morning, and it seemed fine.
So I went to Safeway to pick up some lunch. This was a new innovation. It's pretty much been Walmart and Costco for groceries since we landed on the island, but I wanted to see if Safeway had better bread than the soft and soggy bread that's too common on the island. (They did!) And while there I picked up some old favorites that I haven't had since I landed, such as black-cherry soda and Stax potato chips. It was terrific, and I'm going to have to remember we should stop in Safeway occasionally, and not just be limited by what's at Costco.
And I looked again before I left Safeway, and the traffic was still fine, so off to the trail it was.
And the traffic was fine because it turned out contraflow wasn't going, which was weird.
Anywho, I took my lunch out to the biking trail. Biked out to the first pavilion and ate. Wrote some. Biked out to the end of the trail and then back to Donkey Beach. Landed at a pavilion and wrote more, getting to watch surfing and waves this time. Biked out to the end of the trail again and then finally headed back to the car and eventually to home.
I was reminded again how entirely gorgeous that trail is.
I was also reminded again how easy it is to get my bike onto Julie with the hitch-mounted bike rack I bought. I think I can get the rack and bike on in five minutes or so.
And, I learned I got really lucky with the contraflow. You see Kauai has three trucks that they use to manage the contraflow changes: one to setup signs, one to setup cones, and one to drag a "crash attentuator" (to protect the workers maybe?). One of those trucks had broken down on Friday, so they stopped running contraflow, and I slipped up north the one Saturday that southbound traffic was a nightmare rather than northbound traffic. The County somewhat shockingly said that contraflow was going to be down for another full week while the truck got repaired, which would have been horrible for the Kapaa commuters, but by Tuesday figured out they could use the same truck for both cone and sign setup.
True story.
So those were three varied Saturdays out and about on Kauai.
That would be the first time I've driven anyone to airport (and back). It was delightful to give a little something back after decades of being driven to the airport myself.
It was also the first time that Kimberly and I have been without family on the island since we moved here, and in fact since our first trip on 2001. Which was weird to realize.
But all is returned to normal now, and life is back on its new normal track, with gaming over at their house of course planned for Sunday.
There were three Saturdays while they were away, and as Saturday is usually my restful day away, I was off to three different locales.
(I say restful, but I usually go out somewhere, get some exercise, and do some writing too.)
First Saturday was out at Mahaulepu, my go-to spot for a thoughtless Saturday trip. It's the Tilden of Hawaii for me. (I used to be able to walk straight up into the hills from our house in Berkeley, and on my easy/thoughtless trips there, I'd walk north until I hit Tilden and the drop down to get to the bus stop. It was a 10+ mile one-way trip with a ride back. And no thinking or planning required.)
I usually walk to Mahaulepu from Poipu, Shipwreck Beach, or somewhere in-between, depending on how early or late my morning is going.
Anyway, so I did my typical walk, and then ate lunch out at Mahaulepu and wrote and edited for a while.
Unfortunately, I had a very unwelcome interruption while out there. It turns out that some capitalist scumbags called Kauai ATV have decided that Mahaulepu is a great place for Disneyland style tours, so while I was there, two guides with 20-30 unruly tourists came shouting into the usually (somewhat) quiet area, stopped right in the area I was lunching, and then the main guide watched as his bad-tourists raced off to taunt the nearby tortoises. A second "guide" literally huddled under the bridge while this was happening. When the tourists returned, one even sat down at the table across from me, not giving me my six feet (and not wearing a mask).
Now don't get me wrong. There are tourists on the island. Since we unwisely lifted our COVID quarantines, there have been lots of tourists on the island. I've seen many of them at Mahaulepu. I've often given them directions to the tortoises and the beach. I often tell them that no I don't have wifi, and yes it is a beautiful office. I've exchanged pleasantries with the totally appropriate, respectful, and well-run horseback tours out of the local ranch, both with the tour guides and the tourists.
But there's a big difference between a family of 2-8, a quiet and respectful tour of 10-15 riders, and a large and unruly group of 20-30 who weren't under any sort of control. That tour group was entirely inappropriate for the area.
Afterward I did some bitching on a Kauai Rants FB group, and everyone there was *shocked* to hear about the organized tours at Mahaulepu. Someone pointed me to a Mahaulepu Preservation society, and so I noted the concern to them, and they were *shocked*. They pointed me to the people who run the cave at Mahaulepu and plant all the native plants and take care of the tortoises, and they knew who the tourist group was, and clearly weren't thrilled with them already, and so asked me to file a complaint with Grove Farm who owns the area. So I complained to Grove Farm, and they said they would send an admonition on to Kauai ATV. It won't stop the Disneyland tours, I'm sure, but maybe they'll be better controlled in the future or at least terrorize the tortoises less and trample less native vegetation. Oh, and I should note Grove Farm also lied to me, or at least heavily misrepresented the truth, by saying how thrilled the cave people were about these tours because they were getting some smidgeon of money from it, and overprivileged tourists could make themselves feel better by planting a tree. Having talked to the cave people, I knew this was a lie.
(And I certainly would not have gone to all this trouble of contacting people on my own, but at every stage, I kept hearing "So-and-so will want to know" or "You can help us by telling this to so-and-so." So I did.)
Oh, and if it weren't clear, the tourists weren't in ATVs. That's the other part of the tour. Then they let them all roam free in a mob before hopping into different ATVs.
Sadly, I haven't been back to Mahaulepu since I saw it overrun that Saturday. But I've been adjusting my expectations about our island for three months now. I'm never, ever going to see Mahaulepu so quiet and pleasant as I did when we were in the first year of the pandemic, and our government pretended it cared more about us than the tourists. And now I'm apparently not going to see it without it Disneyland tours going by at top volume and overrunning the picnic area for a while. So we'll see how that goes when I return tomorrow.
Second Saturday was a trip to Kekaha. This is pretty much the end of the road going clockwise, before you get to The Base (PMRF). Dad had showed me the beach once, and I've driven through some of the town a few times on the way to Koke'e (it's on one of the two roads up there), but I'd never really explored it.
I took my bike out, with the intent of biking around Kekaha and maybe Waimea too. I ended up doing just several miles, because it was hot and dry.
I hung out much of the day at the beach at Kekaha. It's pretty windblown and desolate, but there are nice, shaded pavilions, so it was a nice place to write, right on the beach. It was also mostly empty, with just a few (large) local groups out there BBQing on the beach. No tourists. A nice antidote to the Disneyland tourists at Mahaulepu, though while out there I read an article about how some entrepreneur wants to open a huge wave pool right in Kekaha. I can't imagine the county will allow that to happen, but boy it would screw with our traffic if it did, to have a huge tourist attraction out on the backend of the island, and boy it would murder that little community, which is actually a local community, because it's so far from the airport.
After the beach, I biked partway out to PMRF, and decided it was too hot to go that far, then biked around the neighborhoods a bit, and was fascinated by a huge abandoned sugar mill with a towering smoke stack. That was the heart of the town from 1898-2000. Sad to see it rotting away now, but that's the story across Hawaii. I think the coffee plantation and the rum company are some of the few actual production facilities left on this island.
Third Saturday was a trip to the biking trail out on the east side, in Kapaa. I was a bit hesitant about going out there because contraflow has been a nightmare since they started doing road expansion in Kapaa earlier this year, and I hadn't been out there since they expanded contraflow back to Saturdays.
I should explain: a lack of road infrastructure is one of the great sins of Kauai. Since the island started being more welcoming to tourists, I'm not sure when, the population has more than doubled, and the road system has just barely changed. Much of the island is constrained by a highway that's one lane in each direction. So that's problematic. In Kapaa, they're very lucky to have three lanes, two north and one south ... but in the morning most of the traffic is coming from the north. So for decades they've had contraflow where every day they drop down cones in the morning to eat up one of the northbound lanes (and some of the turn lanes) to create a second southbound lane, and then in the late morning or early afternoon, they pick them up.
But the road construction has been playing havoc with that, because when they're contraflowing, they're now having to block a lefthand turn into the Wailua Homesteads, a major residential area, and so any time anyone needs to turn into the Homesteads ... all of the northbound traffic has to wait until they can get across two lanes of rush-hour traffic. Not good.
So I wasn't sure if I wanted to go out to the biking trail Saturday morning, but I looked at the traffic in the morning, and it seemed fine.
So I went to Safeway to pick up some lunch. This was a new innovation. It's pretty much been Walmart and Costco for groceries since we landed on the island, but I wanted to see if Safeway had better bread than the soft and soggy bread that's too common on the island. (They did!) And while there I picked up some old favorites that I haven't had since I landed, such as black-cherry soda and Stax potato chips. It was terrific, and I'm going to have to remember we should stop in Safeway occasionally, and not just be limited by what's at Costco.
And I looked again before I left Safeway, and the traffic was still fine, so off to the trail it was.
And the traffic was fine because it turned out contraflow wasn't going, which was weird.
Anywho, I took my lunch out to the biking trail. Biked out to the first pavilion and ate. Wrote some. Biked out to the end of the trail and then back to Donkey Beach. Landed at a pavilion and wrote more, getting to watch surfing and waves this time. Biked out to the end of the trail again and then finally headed back to the car and eventually to home.
I was reminded again how entirely gorgeous that trail is.
I was also reminded again how easy it is to get my bike onto Julie with the hitch-mounted bike rack I bought. I think I can get the rack and bike on in five minutes or so.
And, I learned I got really lucky with the contraflow. You see Kauai has three trucks that they use to manage the contraflow changes: one to setup signs, one to setup cones, and one to drag a "crash attentuator" (to protect the workers maybe?). One of those trucks had broken down on Friday, so they stopped running contraflow, and I slipped up north the one Saturday that southbound traffic was a nightmare rather than northbound traffic. The County somewhat shockingly said that contraflow was going to be down for another full week while the truck got repaired, which would have been horrible for the Kapaa commuters, but by Tuesday figured out they could use the same truck for both cone and sign setup.
True story.
So those were three varied Saturdays out and about on Kauai.