THAT MUSKY SMELL. At Costco yesterday, we saw a Cybertruck. It's the only one on the island, as far as I know. I pointed and laughed. It's not just that it's a comically ugly car, but that comically ugly people buy it. The driver smiled and waved like he was Mayor McCheese.

GATED COMMUNITY. Late last week, the pet gate for Megara's room (Kimberly's office) arrived. It's intended to better integrate her into the house, through Mango being able to see and smell her more constantly, and through being able to feed them all around the gate without the only barrier being me (as was the case previously, and it was awkward). So I took Saturday off from my normal hiking and biking so that we could actually get it installed. Not a big deal once I figured out the instructions. If it's set just perfectly we can even close the gate and office door at the same time.

The question is whether the 51" height (about 52" since it's not set directly on the floor) will be enough to keep cats from going over the gate. We're pretty sure our large orangies can't get that height with basically nothing to give them footholds, but we're less sure of teeny little Megara.

There is a small cat door down at the bottom of the gate, and so we've been using that to let cats in and out of the room, with the hope that we'll teach them that the cat door is the only way they could possibly get in and out. (Pay no attention to the upper area behind the curtain.)

We'll see if we're smarter than a 1-to-3-year-old (cat).

CREAKINGS IN THE NIGHT. Mind you, we're not fully trusting of the cats yet, so every time we've left the house for an extended amount of time or gone to bed we've closed the door as well as the gate. Until last night. That was the experiment.

I was woken up at 4am by a loud thump. Ugh, I thought, was that a cat clearing the gate? (Or failing to?) Mango was at the foot of the bed, not him. I trekked downstairs and it looked to me like Megara was on the cat tree, though it was hard to figure out for sure because all of her lights were out. But after I stopped by the bathroom I returned and she was right in front of the gate (on the correct side).

I never saw Elmer, and didn't feel like hunting for him at 4am, but I was pretty sure (a) that he was the least likely to clear that gate; and (b) Megara wouldn't have been so casual if he was in the room. So, it was back to bed.

All the cats were on the correct sides of the gate when I woke up in the morning.

LIKE SOME PICASSO OR A GARFUNKEL. I was determined that if I wasn't going to go out for my normal activities on Saturday, we'd at least get some things done. So after the gate installation (and some R&R), Kimberly and I did some work to get art up in our house.

Yes, it's been almost five years since we moved here. No, that isn't quite as bad as it sounds. Griselda has been up in my office since we moved in. We have a Starry Night print that was newly purchased when we moved in in our bedroom. A couple of Hawaiian pieces are also up and some of Kimberly's work. We also had a wedding present from a friend up in the kitchen until it got replaced with a cat shelf. But we had a lot of others to still put up.

So on Saturday we decided where everything was going and put up as much as we could. It feels like there's art _all over_ the house now, everywhere I look. We have a few pieces we want to get framed and a few pieces that need some repair and so we're going to go out to a local framing place some time to close out the work, but they're only open 10-2 three days a week, and that'll take mucking with my work schedule, so we'll take care of it sometime soon, but at the moment we've got enough to take care of (primarily working to get Megara integrated into the house!).

ALL'S WELL. One of the reasons that I had the energy to do all this stuff on Saturday (with the pictures obviously being long-delayed) is that Kimberly has been doing better. Yay! Her abdominal pain from early this year has been resolved through PT. Now she's working on her knee, also with PT. Which means she's walking again and able to help with Megara and the other cats and with dishes and such. So everything is easier right now, allowing us to get back to doing more long-term household work.

BUILD UP THE WALL. In fact, for a while now I've been working on our fourth big work planned for the house. There were actually three of them planned when we moved. We've been doing them slowly not due to lack of energy, but so we could afford it. The first was solar panels. That went in in 2020, first because we knew it'd save us $150+ a month (electricity is EXPENSIVE in Hawaii) and second because the tax refunds for solar energy were dropping every year. (They've since been restored courtesy of Biden, so it turns out we could have saved more if we'd waited two years, but had to pay two years worth of electricity.)

Second was our built-in bookshelves for our family room and offices downstairs, which must have happened at the end of 2022 as we got the cabinets that formed their bases delivered while I was in Europe for an RWOT. I guess that must have been The Hague.

Then we got distracted for a year when Mango (twice!) escaped the house and we had to buy some pretty expensive custom made jalousie windows for the front of the house.

But now we're finally back to our third and final planned project, which is a retaining wall, or rather a set of retaining walls for the back yard. The problem is that we had a nasty slope in what would be a pretty nice sized back yard. 14 foot top to bottom and pretty steep. So we want to flatten it out with walls in between so that we can have more backyard and I can actually mow it all rather than tottering on a steep hill with a weed wgacker where I'll eventually break a leg if I'm not careful.

We got a contractor out here a few months ago and then a surveyor to mark where our property lines actually were, but we ran into problems when we learned there's a drainage way & building set back line in the back of our property where can't build. It was actually kind of frustrating because it's obvious that parts of it have been blocked by our neighbors (it goes down the whole block) but since we're the house on the corner, if there's ever a complaint, it'll be about our very visible back yard.

So I talked with public works who had signed off on the original drainage way and after maybe a month they decided that it was OK to build a wall because it won't obstruct the flow of water in the direction. (An ADU would *not* have been OK, but they said a wall was a house of a different color.) We got a somewhat official letter in email right away but a month later and we're still waiting for the official paperwork on letterhead that we want before we start.

And my contractor hasn't seemed willing to draw up plans and give us an estimate before we do that.

So that's on hold right now, though I'd really like to pull money out of the market while it's up, and especially before the election, but not when I don't even have an estimate. (I might have to make a decision about pulling it out anyway really soon, I just don't want to pay taxes if it doesn't happen this year!)

But, PRO-GRESS.

I had some extra time this Saturday due to a lack of evening gaming plans, so I decided to head up to the north shore to check out a trail that I recently discovered. It's funny, the north shore theoretically isn't a lot further from our house than when I go to Koke'e. Koke'e and the Wai Koa Loop Trail that I went to today both time at about an hour according to Google Maps, but Google Maps never seems to account for how traffic gets backed up when you go around the island because one car inevitably decides to go 40 mph on the highway's single lane. So that hour to Koke'e is really about an hour (because there's less traffic in that direction) and up to Wai Koa it was definitely longer (because I went through Lihue and Kapa'a, the islands two major towns).

Any way, Wai Koa Loop Trail is a trail that used to be available from the Anainu Hou community park on north shore (more on that shortly) and I'd long thought it was just closed, but it turns out that there's another entrance at a dog park a couple of miles on from the community park, and I stumbled across that last month, so I was happy to check it out today.

Parking at the dog park was all parallel parking. It's actually the first time I've parallel parked since I took a quick driving lesson in Berkeley in 2019 before moving out here. I remembered what my instructor had told me, but I also had about a car and a half of space, so it was no problem.

The funny thing is that there's six or ten regular parking spaces there, but they're all marked DOG PARK ONLY. And the really funny thing is: _everyone was actually respecting that signage!_ Which is pretty amazing on Kauai but I'd come to learn that the Wai Koa Loop Trail is likely used by 50-75% residents and ony 25-50% visitors, and that ratio probably helped.

The Wai Koa Loop Trail is one of the widest and best maintained trails I've seen on Kauai, which generally has trails that are, well, not wide or well maintained. Much of it is through forests, including an actual Mahogany Plantation (this is all on private land, so kudos to them for keeping it open and so accessible, something that was apparently much more the case on old Kauai than modern Kauai). But there are also some nice open views of the mountains on the north of the island.

But the real prize of the trip was the Stone Dam at the end, about 2 miles from the dog park. It's an old stone dam built in the late 1800s that's absolutely gorgeous. It was used to ensure consistent waterflow for the sugar plantation that was up here at the time. Now the pool above it is a watering hole that locals swim in. Below that is a drainage area (with a stream flowing through it) that is a bit of a garden and awfully beautifully. There are also few overlooks, one of which has a terrific view of that whole drainage area and dam.

Definitely worth the trip. Next time I'll either bring my swim suit (as most people do) or my computer (so I can sit at one of the overlooks and enjoy the view while writing).

Oh, I should note that this is labeled as a loop trail, but half the loop is now marked closed. There also seems to be threat of the whole trail being closed off because of brats bringing their dogs on the tail unleashed and them killing endangered wild life. Hopefully it won't get closed, as this is the sort of local community spot out in nature that there isn't a whole lot of left on the island!

--

On the way back I stopped at Anainu Hou community park that was previously an entrance to the trail. There are maps of it and all its food trucks and gardens and mini-golf course that are very exciting. But the actual place was desolate. As far I can tell it's just advertising to get people out there to mini-golf and watch a sunset show.

There's actually a really nice playground too, for what that's worth.

I sat at one of the few shaded picnic tables in the area and did a tiny bit of writing, but then headed home.

(Would still mini-golf there! Maybe if Kimberly is doing better some time!)

By the by, the previous access to the Loop Trail has big fences around it as if they were doing construction. It's all in an area that's supposed to be a "market" based on their map, so maybe they're planning on putting in a market and then it'll be possible to get to the trail again. Dunno. Not much is happening if so.

It obviously would have been easy to slip around the fence, and then probably walk out to the trail. (I saw the other side of the "mini golf" arm of the trail when I was walking.)

--

Great to have a new experience on the island. I should do that more often. (And when I found this trail I also found a loop trail above the Wailua River that I've never walked. Maybe next month!)

Trapped in Kōkeʻe

Went up to Kōkeʻe today. That's the park at the top of the island (or at least the topmost part of the island that's accessible). It's got a lovely meadow where I lunch and do some work on my computer and then some nice hikes.

It was a bit bizarre today because when I got up there, there were some ladder trucks from some communications companies at the sides of the entrance to the rear parker-lot. (I think of it as the local parking lot or the meadow parking lot; there's a front parking lot for the Lodge and the Museum and that's always jammed up with tourists, and then there's a road back from there that often is parked solid with cars on both sides, turning it into just one lane, and then there's a dirt parking lot beyond that which is *not* jammed, and is where I park when I hike.) As I was eating and working a bit on my computer, the two ladder trucks put up a banner between them that said "In Memory of ..." some guy and had the US Flag, the Hawaiian State Flag, and the Hawaiian Royal Flag hanging down from it. So that explained the trucks.

After hanging out for a couple of hours I went to drop most of my stuff in the car and someone asked me to move my car over a little. When I'd got to the parking lot at a bit past 10am there'd been almost no one there, but since my arrival cars had parked up on both sides of me and I'd ended up with not quite a car width to my left and a bit to my right, and this lady was looking for a space. I could see that there was now a big tent being set up for the memorial, and so I was game. I scooted around and the woman who'd asked me pulled into the new space next to me.

As I was heading out for my hike I saw someone else park behind a couple of cars. I assumed it was for the memorial, and I paused to look at it for a moment, because it looked like a really bad idea. Like that guy might know the two cars he was parking behind would be there as long as he was, but he was just going to encourage other people to do the same.

I actually thought about parking elsewhere a few times. When I'd been pulling in, I'd considered parking right in front of the museum, because that easy to access space on the end was empty. And then as I was heading out for my hike, I considered seeing if there was space in the teeny little dirt parking lot next to one of the hiking trails. (There's just space for 4 or 5 cars, so the answer is often no.)

Anywho, I went out and hiked for a bit less than two hours. I have a nice little ridge trail that I've been liking lately after discovering it last year, and that's what I took. It was good, and I felt stronger than I have since I started taking alpha blockers last year, which has played havoc with my muscles.

And I got back and I discovered the memorial was in full swing and the back parking lot was like a game of Rush Hour, except without any spaces. In other words, the whole thing was solid cars, going every which way. There was no way Julie the Benz was getting out without at least half a dozen cars moving.

I'd thought I *might* get boxed in from what I saw before I left, but I hadn't imagined quite that level of chaos.

Here's something weird about Hawaii: there definitely is aloha spirit. A kindness and a desire to help people. But there's also a really surprising amount of selfishness and self-absorption, of doing things that obviously are going to inconvenience other people and just not caring. We see it in our local neighborhood if we have the bad luck to be coming home in the hour or so around when the elementary school is letting out, because the parents literally line up their cars in the street, blocking it, and in doing so block the ONLY WAY to get onto the one-way street we live on. And here it was again, with those people not even knowing if they might be blocking in people not even at the memorial (as they were).

No problem. It was only 2pm. I'd been planning to call it an early day and get some shave ice from the best shave ice store on the island (Jojo's) on the way home, a treat I haven't had in a year or so. But I could hang. I grabbed my computer and headed back to my lunch table. It was getting a little chilly, but I had a raincoat. So I did a bit of work and played some games. I can keep myself entertained until the battery runs out when I have my laptop.

(Current work? I did some reorganization of some chapters of TSR Book 4 this morning, thanks to a shower revelation about how to improve them; and then in the afternoon I went back to formatting my recent AtoZChallenge, for publication on RPGnet and in a PDF.)

I was there for a bit more than two hours more.

For the first hour, the memorial was going on, and I'd occasionally see cars head to that back parking lot. Sometimes just one, but frequently two or three at once, because cars get stuck behind slow cars coming up to Kōkeʻe. They'd edge down that long lane, lined with the cars, and then they'd come to a halt at the entrance to the back parking lot, under the banner. Then they'd edge in anyway, and be lost to my sight for a while. Then the car, or sometimes two or three cars, would do the Reverse of Shame as they backed up about two football fields, down that tight, car-packed lane, through the Museum parking lot, until they could at least turn around in front of the Lodge. I must have seen a dozen cars do it over the course of an hour!

The memorial finally finished and I started seeing people leave. The first half-dozen had to do the Reverse of Shame too, but then cars starting coming out going forward.

But the vast majority of the people stayed around as there was food, and places to talk. A bit after 4pm, I decided that the parking lot must have cleared out enough that I could get out. So back I went to Julie the Benz.

The parking lot was still Rush Hour. But there were at least spaces in it now. A woman seeing me looking puzzled at what I should do asked which car I was trying to get out, and I pointed to Julie. She identified the two cars that had to be moved and grabbed the owners, and poof! Julie was free. Well, I had to make a really tight exit from the parking lot because there was a big truck almost blocking the exit. And then I had to go down the car lane, but in forward. But then I was free.

And I was home at least an hour later than I would have liked. But home at least.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

On the way back from Kōkeʻe, I discovered that the only movie theatre on island, which only ever (occasionally) shows Marvel movies, started running the new Dungeons & Dragons movie yesterday. Looks like they have five showings, and maybe five again next week (unclear, but they say it's a two week show).

So Kimberly and I got tickets for next Wednesday. It'll be our first time in a movie theatre on-island (and also the first time since the pandemic started, though we've been to some plays).

THE DECK FAILURE

In other news, we have now failed three times to paint our lanai, which my dad and I finished putting back together a week and a half ago.

Last week Kimberly and I pulled out the three cans of deck paint that my dad had brought over, which were labeled with our street. The first two were sort of the color of the deck, but with a red tint, and they smelled rotten. The third one had the lid rusted out and had turned to black goo.

So after that Kimberly and I brought some shards of wood to Home Depot for paint matching, but the guy told us that because they were moldy and otherwise dirty he couldn't get a good color match. (We also tried some numbers I'd pulled off the old can, but they didn't turn up anything useful in his database.) Fortunately, I remembered that we'd cut and kept about four foot of deck on the theory that it might be good for reuse.

So I powerwashed that Thursday and then we brought it in to Home Depot on Friday, and they got a (hopefully accurate) color match ... and then discovered they didn't have the right base to make the color. (What they had was, ironically, too red.) They might have the base in next week, but probably not.

We've also been waiting on a new 6 Amp-hour 40V battery from Home Depot for my lawn tools that was due in about a month ago, so I definitely don't have hope the correct base will show up soon. The paint lady told us she'd call us when they got in the base, but in Hawaii that often doesn't happen, so we'll see ...

We had a good day today.

Callisto ate most of her half-can of wet food for breakfast, ate a full half-can for dinner, and was rather voracious about it, and started drinking water again. I'm hopeful she's turned a corner.

In the afternoon, Kimberly and I visited the whitest, most overprivileged athletic club on the island. After noting the monotone clientele, we learned that they offered no day passes and their monthly membership required a one-year commitment, plus a $300 initiation fee. In other words, they wanted about $2,300 to join. We could obviously see it was intended to keep the poorer locals out and away from their club that they also sell to tourists. I felt nauseous as the gatekeepers (literal and metaphorical) tried to explain their policy.

Overall, it was the most disgusting thing I've seen on the island since we moved here.

We'd gone to the club because Kimberly has to have a pool that has shallow sections so that she can put increasing weight on her foot. She wasn't sure that the YMCA pool met that criteria because the main pool is all 4.5 feet or deeper. But today she tried out the kid's pool, and that runs from 1.5 feet to 4 feet, and they were happy to let her use it for that purpose, so score!

We now have a family membership at the Y, for the next several months while she does her PT, and we don't have to join the white imperialists club — which we would have if it was the only option for Kimberly to get the PT she needed to get walking again, but we would have been very unhappy about funding everything that's wrong in Kauai.

Afterward, Kimberly and I went to Safeway mainly to pick up some cat treats, but we also picked up some tasty pasta salads and some varieties of cooked chicken and some desserts for a tasty dinner to destress.

We forgot the cat treats.

Fortunately, Kimberly remembered before we got to the car, so I just had to stand in the always-long line at Safeway a second time.

Truth 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.

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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.

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So those were three varied Saturdays out and about on Kauai.

I don't think I wrote that last month I finally got my bike rack assembled so that I could mount it on Julie the Benz's trailer hitch. For its debut, I used it to take my bike out to the Kauai Trail that runs down the east shore of the island (and will perhaps someday be expanded past its current length, but perhaps not, as NIMBYs exist here on the island too, and they're fighting that expansion). Perhaps not the best choice to use the new rack all the way on the highway out to Kapa'a, but that was what I needed it for.

The Kauai Trail is always a beautiful ride, as it runs right along the ocean, and as is often the case, I got to bike it with my dad and Mary (and afterward headed back up the trail to find a mini-pavilion to write for a few hours).

For the bike rack's second outing, I took it out to Koloa this recent Saturday. This is something I'd been wanting to do for a while, as Koloa is one of the closest areas to us that you can really bike around. And a place that I'm pretty familiar with since we've been going there since 2001. I'd been hoping to bike there when tourists were off the island and there weren't a lot of cars in the area, but even missing that opportunity, I was determined to give it a shot.

---

Saturday was actually a mess of a morning. I got out to the garage and found that my bike had a flat in the rear tire. This has been an ongoing problem for at least three years now: slow leaks developing in the back tire. I've had bike shops check it out any number of times. I even went to further away bike shops in Berkeley after Mike's Bikes failed me, and I just kept getting the flats until finally I got a tire with sealant goop in it. But that tire totally came apart before one of my outings last year.

Fortunately, I had some goop on hand and I put it into the tire. Unfortunately, afterward the thing wouldn't inflate. @)(#$*)@(#$ goop.

Fortunately I also had a thorn resistant tire on hand. So after the goop failure that went in.

It was still a frustrating morning and I got to Koloa much later than planned.

---

I landed at Poipu Beach, mainly so that I could drop off recyclables. Ah, the glamour of semi-rural living.

It was so late by that time that I just biked down to the Shops at Kukui'ula for lunch, where I hit my second obstacle of the day: no chicken. Since beef makes me sick, Savage Shrimp it was.

---

But that was the last obstacle on an otherwise amazing day.

The bike from Poipu to the Shops was great. It was terrific seeing land that I've walked and driven from atop a bike. It felt very empowering.

From there I went all the way out to Spouting Horn, and was amazed how my bike just ate up the miles. Two miles, it turns out. A long walk, which I've done a few times, as far back as 2001 (though the Shops weren't actually there at the time, but our condo was very nearby), and just a quick zooming, beautiful ride on my bike.

---

I always love getting to sit out somewhere and do some writing on my days out, and I'd chosen Spouting Horn as my most likely locale for the day.

Surprisingly, it was still almost as empty as it was when we had no tourists. The new vendor stalls there are still closed up, the dreaded tour buses are still absent, and so there were at most a dozen people out there at a time, looking at the spout. The picnic tables were mostly empty.

I wrote for almost two hours. Edited and organized and updated really. My most frequent day-out writing currently is The TSR Codex, and I finished my first draft of chapter 9 of book 2.

---

From there it was back to the Shops, then up Kalanikaumaka to a ride that my dad had suggested: into the actual Kukui'ula subdivision.

This is a luxury housing area (and a luxury golf course) a mile or more up from the shore in western Koloa. There's just the one way in and out, with no access down to the shoreline, to keep all the riff-raff off. My dad thinks it all might be private land, and it sort of looks like that could be the case, but if so there's no signs proclaiming that, so I happily biked in.

It was GORGEOUS. Because this was Richie Rich land, the landscaping was all beautiful, and done in the most authentic (totally-fake-white-privilege) Hawaiian style with all kinds of ferns and other tropical plants. There was actually a surprising lack of no-trespassing signs, given how many I see in less affluent parts of the island. And you could see down to the shore almost the whole ride along.

I was shocked how far the road went. Almost the same two miles I'd ridden on the parallel road to Spouting Horn. Definitely the best part of the ride, and I noticed there were a few walking pathways _also_ not specified as no-trespassing. Future possibilities!

So I'll definitely be back. Maybe I'll get run off some time, when the island gets even more crowded and Boss Hogg gets more vigilant, but Saturday's ride was great.

---

I did a bit more riding, cutting across Koloa proper, then going down the bypass road on the backside of town, which is one of the few places with an actual bike lane (and thus one of my original plans).

I got back to Poipu about 5.15, and though I'd considered swimming in the afternoon, I decided it was time to come home.

---

So that was my biking day in Koloa.

It was good to bike around a community, not just along a trail or a backroad. It reminded me a bit of life back in the Bay Area. And there was still plenty gorgeous to see. I'll definitely be back.

(Overall, I really need to figure out how to increase my biking here in Kauai, as it's much better exercise than just walking or even hiking, so I'd like to be doing more of it.)

---

I was planning to also use this journal entry to talk about my happiness that taxes are done for 2020, and I considered it a major landmark ... but today I got a letter from the Department of Taxation saying they think I owe a lot more money, with the problem apparently being at least in part that they lost a rather large payment I sent them in April. (Fortunately, I have my confirmation number.)

@#)$@*#)#.

So milestone not yet achieved.

And that's the second time in my adult life that a tax authority has lost my tax payments. I mean, seriously, people? You just have one job.

Hawaii's vaccination rollout has literally been horrific, in large part because the state has decided to throw vulnerable populations under the bus to fill the ever-gluttonous maw of the tourism industry. So, in callous disregard for CDC guidelines, they opted to name non-essential groups like bartenders and concierges and timeshare salesman (and for that matter architects, IT professionals, and who-knows-what-else) as essential and let them cut in the vaccine line ahead of people with serious health conditions. In fact, Hawaii only identified three super dangerous conditions for early vaccines, and left the vast majority of people with kidney disease, HIV, asthma, and other conditions more likely to cause them to die out in the cold.

Which literally means that Hawaii chose for vulnerable people to die to get tourism going faster.

---

But, that's kind of been the trend throughout the pandemic. Hawaii has made it very clear that there's a deep cancer in the state that leads them to put tourists above residents. That's not something I'd really realized in my own 20 years of visiting here, not even in the previous 13 years, when I was family, not a tourist per se. But you live here and it becomes as obvious as the palm trees and the turquoise ocean.

It's pretty easy to see in the state's quarantine procedures.

Our island, Kauai, has a mayor who's been very uneven in his plague proclamations, varying between too strict, too dumb, and too lax, but he's the one mayor who has generally fallen on the side of protecting the population, and that shows. Except for 6 or so scary weeks in October and November, when Mayor Kawakami bent over for the tourism industry to let plague-carriers back on the island in a limited (but it turns out not sufficiently limited) way, anyone coming to Kauai has had to do a little bit of work. For the last three or four months we've had a good compromise: a 3 day quarantine and a second test after arrival. Not torturous, but enough to halt the community spread that began when Mayor Kawakami foolishly opened the island up more last fall.

The other islands? Not so much. They have their 14-day quarantine, but you can opt out with a pre-arrival test which is totally inadequate, and so they've all had pretty high quantities of COVID at various times, and it remains in the community on at least Oahu and Maui.

The result is really horrible when you consider the numbers.

Kauai has a population of 70,000, compared to 1.4M for the islands overall. So we've got almost exactly 5% of the overall population.

We've also had 1 COVID death. (My dad says one of his doctors said 2, but if so that other one has never been officially reported). Extrapolating that, there should be 20 deaths on the islands overall (or 40). The actual number? 460.

Now those other islands don't have some of the natural advantages that Kauai does, like being a smaller and more rural community, and thus having people who actually care about the community, unlike the sociopathy that naturally grows in larger cities (such as Honolulu).

But still, that's at least a few hundred citizens that those other islands sacrificed to keep their tourism open.

---

Unfortunately, our inconstant Mayor has once again wavered over to the side of the tourism industry. At the start of March he announced that as of April 5th the islands would be open with just the pre-testing that we already know is inadequate, that let something like 20 false negatives onto the island last Fall and quickly led to community spread, to our island's one death, and to a threat to our extremely limited (9) ICU beds.

Now there were doubtless some political reasons for this. Some representatives in the State House who were even deeper into the pockets of the tourism industry were advancing a new law that would disallow mayors (and even the Governor) from adjusting access to the islands based on COVID concerns. It would have been a disaster that would have led to the tourism industry killing even more residents. And, that seemed to get dropped as soon as Mayor Kawakami announced his return to "Safe" Travels. And, doubtless, Mayor Kawakami has been getting pressured the whole time by people who care more about bucks than lives.

But the result, that Mayor Kawakami stopped running with the finish line in sight, is deeply frustrating. Even moreso when you consider we were on the verge of new money coming in to help people and businesses and states impacted by economic losses.

Scientists have been very clear that there isn't yet enough vaccine in arms to actually slow the spread of COVID. So, we're now likely to get a repeat of last Winter, where COVID escapes into the community again and threatens the at-risk people who Hawaii has refused to give vaccination priority.

And all we had to do was wait a few months more.

---

Here's the one bright spot: Kauai is the one island that is getting more progressive in its vaccinations.

Kimberly and I noticed on Monday when the County started posting kind of weird announcements that you should sign up for for a vaccine as an essential worker, and if you didn't qualify, you'd be placed on their waitlist. Because it wasn't like the whole essential-workers thing was new.

I told Kimberly that she should sign up immediately, and I did the same. I hadn't quite twigged to what was going on yet, I just figured that we could drop everything and be in Lihue in 30 minutes at the drop of a hat if they suddenly had an unexpected opening.

But the next morning I found waiting in my email box a token to sign up for vaccinations, and after Kimberly filled out their quickly changing form a few more times, she did too.

When I looked at the vaccination signups, it became obvious to me that Kauai was constrained by the state's guidelines, and thus had been wasting vaccinations slots, so they were trying to find a technically allowed solution for that. Because the day I got my OK back, on Tuesday, I looked at the signups and there were slots that had gotten wasted that day (because I noticed my email too late to do anything), and there were about 100 slots available on Wednesday and over 150 on Thursday. So, Kauai was pretending to make a waitlist, but was also moving people off of it immediately.

So Kimberly and I signed up for the same slot on Thursday morning, and we were off ...

---

Cut to the vaccination clinic on Thursday morning.

There were quite a few people out there getting their shots yesterday, but it was well-administered.

It all happened at the War Memorial Convention Hall in Lihue, which I'd never been to, but seems like a medium-sized community center with an auditorium for a few hundred people.

The line out front was maybe 15-20 people deep. One volunteer moved up and down the line to make sure everyone had their pre-vaccination questionnaire filled out. We moved up and got checked in. A short time later, after a second short line, we met a second administrator just outside the hall, who double-checked our ID and gave us our vaccination card. Then it was inside, to a third line, and finally to the vaccinator.

My vaccinator told me that they didn't have cookies like they did out at the Veterans Hospital, but they could offer blue bandaids instead of clear/white ones. I was deeply disappointed over the lack of cookies, but did my best not to show it, and told her the vaccine and the blue bandaid were more than enough.

The vaccine was perhaps the most painless shot I'd ever had. My vaccinator wasn't as good with distracting me with meaningless conversation while sneaking up to stab me as most people giving me shots (or taking blood) are, but I literally didn't feel the needle.

Afterward it was on to line #4, which led into the auditorium, where Kimberly and I sat far from anyone else for 15 minutes to make sure we didn't keel over dead from the vaccine. (Because when you're giving vaccines to 70k people or 1.4M or 350M or 7.5B or whatever, some *will* have side effects. It's normal and expected, because statistics are real assholes.)

Administrator #3 wrote on a piece of paper when we could leave. I think mine said 9.47 or 9.49.

So Kimberly and I got in line at 9.10 for our 9.20 appointment, and we were back in Julie the Benz before 10.00. Not bad!

---

Side effects?

My arm has somewhat hurt ever since. Not bad, but noticeable, especially if I do something stupid like lean on a wall with that arm.

I was a little tired yesterday afternoon, and so did work that I could do while listening to music. When my dad came over and we worked on transitions for Kimberly's closet, that perked me up.

I was a little achey this morning from where I'd been sleeping.

So, stronger side effects than any vaccines I've had in years, but not particularly notable in the scheme of things. My only concern is that shot #2 might be worse, but so it goes. (COVID would be a lot worse, and could potentially lead to very long-term side effects.)

---

I am *thrilled* to be vaccinated, but also aware that it's about five weeks too late for what our mayor has done to our island. Because when we get tourists back in larger numbers on Monday, this first vaccination won't even have taken effect. Another week after that I'll have some immunity, but it'll still be another few weeks before I can get my second shot and two weeks beyond that that I should have my 94.5%.

And, we've clearly been seeing increased tourists already: selfish assholes who think that it's their right to have a fun vacation in the middle of a pandemic. I was out on the trails above Waimea Canyon last weekend and met at least half-a-dozen people who were clearly tourists (including flying-his-drone-in-the-canyon man and literally-dangling-out-over-the-canyon-for-a-selfie-holding-on-only-with-her-hands lady, who I was certain I was about to see plunge to her death). It made me nervous being anywhere close to them (and also made me aware that I should have walked those particular trails more while the tourists were gone, alas!).

---

On the bright side, Kauai has now been able to announce that they are opening vaccines to everyone 16+. That news came in a few hours after Kimberly and I got our vaccines yesterday. They must have been able to convince the state that their excess capacity was not going away.

The irony? That starts on April 5th, which is the exact same day that the tourists start flooding back on a swell of disease. So, that'd be vaccinations that are generally being made available six weeks too late.

Like I said, our mayor saw the finish line in the distance, and thought he'd won the race without getting there.

Might be some hard months ahead for our island.

Skotos. Stick a fork in it: Skotos is done. Yeah, it's been a long-time coming, but this week I helped Chris file the Certificate of Dissolution for the corporation and dropped a letter to the IRS saying we were done with the EIN. Whew. It takes a lot of effort to properly close out a corporation! And that's also a capstone on twenty years of my work-life. Granted, there's still one machine to take down, the trickiest one. And I'm still offering some extremely light support for RPGnet. But, whew.

Flooring. My dad and I have now been working on the flooring in Kimberly's office forever. I mean, most of it is that we're slow-walking the job. We've only once or twice, I think, put in more than one afternoon in a week. But it's also taken a lot of time. Nine afternoons, I think: one to rip out the carpet, one to clean up the floor, three to lay the main flooring, three to lay the flooring in the closet, and one to pick up wood for transitions and trim. (With us not doing any more that day in part because the road back from town was temporarily blocked, in what would turn out to be the first of two times this week. We need a backup road!) As that count might suggest, the closet was the biggest problem. There was one afternoon where by my count we put down five square feet of planking! There were two issues here: one, getting the planking under the corners and under the trim we left in place; and two, a built-in shelf which caused us to have to do the closet in parts, then connect it up. (When we get around to my closet, it'll be a little easier, as there's no shelf there.) Still left? Cutting the trim, painting the trim, placing the trim, placing the thresholds. And then building the murphy bed that arrived in February. Then Kimberly gets her office back and we get a guest room, for use post-COVID.

Rain. Ah, it has been raining here in Kauai. Like most of the year. But especially the last month and a half or so. The few times I've been able to make it out to a weekend hike, it's been by dodging rain. Last time I went out to Mahaulepu, I wore my rain jacket part of the way, and came back an hour or two early when it started pouring. We thought it was a particularly wet January when we arrived last year and it rained for 30 days straight, but this year has seemed even rainier.

Flooding. And then there was today. We got 5 inches of rain in the last day, 2.5 inches in the last 12 hours. At times it was absolutely pouring outside, the most rain I've ever seen here. And, there was flooding. Out on the main street near our house, one of our neighbor's dirt driveway was being washed down into the street, and so the whole oncoming lane was filled with red water. There was much worse flooding elsewhere on the island. Old Koloa looks like all the shops got hit, something I expect they really didn't need after a year of pandemic. The main road into town was closed for a bit (again). Here in Kalaheo there was flooding reaching up into parked cars on the other side of the highway, near the reservoir. (Thank goodness we're at the top of a hill.) We had flood warnings going off every few hours, and the police were really serious about only driving in case of emergency. We'll see how bad the damage is in the next few days. (Meanwhile, north shore was already cut off before today's deluge, due to a landslide yesterday morning that cut off everything west of Princeville. So, welcome to the wettest place on Earth.)

Writing. Meanwhile, I've felt a bit less stressed about writing this month. Though that's primarily because I'm still in the research phase for next month's Designers & Dragons, which means that I've been able to make time for both the TSR Codex and the Elf Book, my other two major projects. (The TSR Codex got a major chapter in draft already for the month, while the Elf Book is as usual trailing, because there's so much technical and thoughtful work that takes a lot of time for a little words.) Anyway, feeling good, especially since that's all been while I've also been preparing tax info for our accountants: I've literally got a PDF of 100 pages for them, with just one topic to go: the house sale. Which will be a big pain, but the end is in sight.

And that's life on Kauai.

Once upon a time, native Hawaiians would make treks across Kauai through the interior, along various paths. Today, those paths are largely collapsed thanks to invasive goats causing erosion, and remaining cross-island trails like the Powerline Trail aren't necessarily in the best of shape.

I should say that I have no idea if the Powerline Trail was actually an ancient trail. As the name suggests today it parallels a high-voltage electricity line. But, it runs along ridge lines toward the northeast of the island, well inland from the highway that goes around the island. So it could have been such an ancient path.

L. and I had been making plans to walk it for a while. We'd originally intended to walk the whole thing, from north to south: 10-11 miles and 6-7 hours, but I read enough about the poor state of the trail that I decided I'd prefer to investigate it before we went to all the trouble of setting up cars in a shuttle.

So that's what we did yesterday.

Or at least what we planned.

---

The south side of the Powerline Trail is up in the Keahua Arboretum, a little park up in the hills west of Kapa'a. I'd been up there once before, to hike the Kuilea Ridge Trail, but my dad drove. He commented at the time that I wouldn't like driving the road, and he was right. It got pretty narrow toward the end, with a scary ditch just to the right of the road. Bleh.

I met L. up there, because his wife doesn't want him driving in the car with other folks right now, which is entirely understandable. More on that momentarily.

After we met at the parking lot, we walked up the road to the Powerline Trail, which is just a wee bit past the Arboretum. The plan was to go maybe 2.5 to 3.5 miles in, because there were some good outlooks there.

We made it about half a mile. My dad had told me that the start of the trail was quite overgrown. And, it actually wasn't horrible, but there was a lot of brush. I'd also read that it turned into a swamp in the middle.

What I wasn't prepared for was that it turned into a lake just a half-mile in. Or a river, or something. The trail was entirely submerged.

L. bravely tried to work his way through the weeds to the left of the trail. He commented that he was happy there weren't any snakes on the island, and I agreed. They're a real threat if you go off-trail in my long-time home of California as well as his native Kentucky. Here, we just had to contend with the buffalo grass. But we spent maybe five minutes making it five or ten feet, and then we got to a place where we couldn't really go forward any more, even with L. swinging his machete.

Fortunately, it looked to me like we'd gotten past the flooded portion of the trail, so I fought through the brush to get back there, and ... SPLASH!

That was the end of our attempt to walk the Powerline Trail.

We're going to try again from the north, sometime soon, and if we can get far enough along that to see the center, and if looks manageable enough, we'll try the whole thing next summer, when everything's had a few weeks to dry.

---

L. suggested that we walk the road past the Powerline Trail, and he was right, it was a gorgeous quarter or half mile. It ended at a river crossing, where the road is partially submerged, with the river flowing over it. This is apparently the path to the Blue Hole, one of the amazing sites in Kauai, with numerous waterfalls flowing down from Mount Waialeale. That definitely sounds like a place for a future hike, but it would need to be planned to begin with wading.

On our way back, we explored a little side path, which looked like it was a real path, but which was extremely overgrown, so that we were constantly pushing plants back as we advanced. We went up that a bit too, but I eventually got tired of fighting with the plants, and we turned back, with no idea of what that trail really was or where it went.

---

There were tourists.

Out by the entrance to the Powerline we saw a pair of women who asked what the trail was like, and when we told them it was flooded, they seemed entirely determined to continue on. They had this spark in their eye like this was going to be their only chance ever, and if they had to wade through miles of lakes, they would.

Later in the day, we met another pair of women, and these ones were looking for somewhere to swim, which was pretty weird, but L. pointed them to the river at the Arboretum. When she was talking to us, one of those women kept taking a step forward, and I kept taking a step back.

Friday was the 15th day since we've started allowing people onto the islands without quarantine if they take a pre-arrival test. The problem is that it's a wholly inadequate response that's going to bring COVID back to our island, which has been almost entirely safe due to our hard work and sacrifice over the last six months. Now, Governor Ige and Mayor Kawakami are pissing our sacrifice away.

In just the last four days we've had four different people (I think! The stories were so redundant that I'm not 100% sure that it was four cases and not three) who came down with COVID on Kauai after testing negative before they arrival. Those were people who came in sick because the scant few cases of COVID we've had in recent months has all been in quarantine. (At least as scary was the woman flying to another island who didn't have her test results before she got on the plane, and as soon as she landed and turned on her phone, discovered she was positive. That means that everyone on that flight was potentially exposed, like that ill-fated flight to Ireland the other week that five days ago had already exploded to 59 cases.) Anywho, three or four imported cases here on Kauai, and as of today that's already spread to two more. 59 cases is just around the corner.

That means that out of greed and laziness and shitty politics (kowtowing to the tourism board) we're definitely letting COVID on to the island, and we KNEW how to do it safer (a required post-arrival test, at the minimum). Our mayor's half-assed answer: make post-arrival tests optional, and try to bribe tourists into taking it. Well, the county has just reported that a grand total of 2% of all tourists are taking advantage of that. That's because we're admitting ticking time bombs to the islands who DON'T WANT TO KNOW if they have COVID, because if they get tested, their ill-advised, irresponsible vacation will cause them to be trapped here for at least two weeks. So instead, we can expect any tourist COVID cases to have a higher instance of infecting other people, from their hotels, to their restaurants, to the beaches, to the hiking trails, to the plane ride back. Two weeks on, we should be seeing our numbers start to upward upward any moment, and the only way we're not going to have our nine ICU beds on Kauai totally overwhelmed is if Honolulu goes straight over the cliff first.

Fun times.

That all means that I was very wary of any tourists we met on Friday (and I've been a bit concerned about them over at Poipu Beach too).

---

After all of our other explorations we decided to walk the Kuilau Ridge Trail. I did it once before, back before the pandemic. It was much less muddy this time (which tells me that the Powerline Trail must be VERY susceptible to mud & flood). It has gorgeous views of Waialeale and the nearby mountains. I actually got my first-ever good view of the Blue Hole crater, because there was a short time when it wasn't covered with clouds.

We walked to the bridge, which is the middle part of that trail, and turned back, because by then we saw it'd be at least 4 by the time we got back to the car.

---

So, a good day's walking. I was actually pretty sore that night and Saturday morning, which surprised me.

I do like my solitaire hikes, but it was nice having a hiking partner for once. L. was easy to talk to, which isn't a surprise as he's a community leader who talks with people. We've tentatively planned to do another joint hike toward the end of November, though it increasingly becomes a question of what the weather will allow, since hiking is obviously quite susceptible to rain. We might try the north side of the Powerline Trail next time, if the stars (and clouds) align.

On Saturday, I took Julie back up to Kōkeʻe State Park, above Waimea Canyon.

Oh, that's a long and windy road up there (and back). Out to Waimea is no big deal: a similar distance as to Lihue. But then you head up Waimea Canyon Road, and it's 30 minutes or more of back and forth and up and down, like a roller coaster, but in your car (Julie). I'm getting more comfortable on the road, and so I pretty consistently drove it at 25-30mph, with occasionally dips to 20mph for tight curves. But cars sometimes got backed up behind me. I was a good carizen, and pulled into the first look-out on the way in, to let someone pass, then I pulled off onto dirt twice on the way back, for the same. Two of the cars were very polite and gave me lots of room, but it was obvious they wanted to go faster. The third came roaring up behind me at 50mph or so. One minute he wasn't there, the next he was. (The speed limit for the whole road, I should note, is 25mph, which is slow, but about right.)

My immediate destination was the huge glade in front of the Kōkeʻe Lodge and the Kōkeʻe Natural History Museum, which I'd spotted as a great place to eat and write and hang out when my dad, Mary and I were up there last month. And, it was. It was really wonderfully chilly, which is pretty nice after nine months in the warm Hawaiian sun, and there was picnic tables around the south side of the glade, which kept them out of the direct sunlight. I was there around 10am, so it was early enough to get a seat which I did. I had a great lunch (other than the soda I'd picked up in Waimea, which turned out NOT to have a twist-off cap, and is as a result came home with me), and I worked my way through an article for the TSR Codex over the course of an hour.

After that it was out to the Nualolo Trail. This is a 3.8 mile trail that drops down from 3,800 feet to 2,400 feet and goes to an outlook over the Nā Pali Coast. I figured it was well within my capacity based on hiking in California ... but I just don't understanding hiking in Hawaii yet.

It initially popped over a rise and then started dropping down through forested areas, mixing evergreens and Hawaiian foliage. It leveled out before too long, and there was at least a mile through various sorts of forest and scrub. But somewhere past the 2 mile mark it started dropping more and more, mostly in little slotted water ways that were treacherous because of the loose dirt. I managed to slip three times (or maybe two and a half: one was only a half fall before I caught myself on the side of the slot) before hitting the 2.75 mile mark. By that time I decided that my new Costco shoes (which are light slip-ons) just weren't sufficient for the terrain, and that I'd turn back the next time I hit a treacherous slot: which was before the 3 mile mark. Alas, no overlook for me.

There were, fortunately, some nice views here and there in that last half mile or so, both of the ocean to the west and of Niʻihau, the Forbidden Island, which looked like it was floating in the sky.

And then I began the climb back up through all of those slots. In the increasing sun (because we were mostly out of the foliage at that point), it was exhausting. I actually had to sit down for 5 minutes or so at one point because I was sufficiently out-of-breath and overheated. Not what I'm used to! But Hawaii has not just direct, hot sun but also high enough humidity that sweating doesn't really cool you down. After that rest, I managed to make it up through the slots before I rested again, and then I was able to walk the rest of the way.

Way more tiring than that 6 or 7 miles would have been in California! (I might also not be used to hiking at an altitude of 3,000 to 4,000 feet: I dunno how much a difference that makes.)

Still, a nice hike, with nice Hawaiian scenery, and just a bit of a view.

There's a loop of trails in that area, with both Nualolo and Awaawapuhi trails going out to the Nualolo Cliffs Trail, which runs along a ridge. I didn't make it out to the Cliffs Trail on Nualolo, so next time I'll try Awaawapuhi, which is a teeny bit shorter, and maybe start a bit earlier (as opposed to Saturday where I put away my work and started hiking at 11am, I think).