Well, after the maelstrom of activity we have had over the past few days, today was a relatively calm, sane day here in Hawaii. I started the day off by waking up just before sunset and walking over to the orchid garden in our resort to snap some photos while the light was good and managed to get a few neat shots. Pictures taken, I headed back to the room for some food and coffee where we made a few plans for the coming day.
We decided to start off the day by taking care of a little light shopping then visiting the National Botanical Gardens just down the street from the resort. There we walked around the visitor center and viewed the demonstration gardens though we didn’t take either of the tours available, mostly because they would take a long time and were really expensive ($30 per person). Anyway, after spending a bit of time in the garden, we drove up out of Poipu, through Lihue, and on to Wailua Falls, our second waterfall viewing of the week. Wailua Falls are a much more mainstream tourist attraction on Kauai since there is no hiking necessary to view the cascading water, only a short drive with easy parking directly across the street from the falls. It’s a spectacular sight, but bad weather has eroded the path down to the base of the falls, meaning that it can only be enjoyed from the one view provided from the road. After snapping a few photos we declared the falls seen and headed back into town for some lunch.
For lunch we decided to visit Kilohana Plantation, an old sugar plantation that has been converted into a series of shops selling various trinkets, art, and jewelry created on Kauai. The building itself is the most expensive house ever built on Kauai and is a palatial estate, sitting on 26,000 acres of land with a 15,000 square foot house. After lunch, we toured around the shops a bit, but didn’t find anything we really liked and headed back out to enjoy the rest of the day. Back in Lihue, we decided to visit the Kauai Museum, a great little museum with exhibits detailing Kauai’s creation, its early inhabitants, and modern history. The museum was really old school with a few musty dioramas and lots of typos in all the descriptions, but had some otherwise good information. We all agreed, however, that the museum would have been a much better attraction upon first coming to the island since the information it presents isn’t stuff you generally care about much on the way out. Oh well, it was still fun.
Following the museum, we headed to the airport to drop off the car and catch our flight back to Oahu. At the desk, the lady helping us bumped us up a flight so that we wouldn’t have to wait so long in the airport lobby, moving us from 5:50 to 4:45 PM, cutting almost an hour out our wait time. This turned out to be a fairly pointless move since the plane we boarded at 4:45 experienced mechanical failures that prevented it from taking off, forcing us to grab all our stuff off the plane, head back into the terminal, and board a different plane to Oahu. The crew was incredibly friendly and apologetic about the whole ordeal, which was nice but kind of unnecessary since I’m sure everybody would rather have them get a different plane than fly a broken one over the ocean.
Back in Oahu, we grabbed Nancy, my aunt’s, car from the parking lot and set off in search of some much needed dinner. I suggested that we try a small Italian place near the college called Auntie Pastos, something everybody agreed to readily and we found with fairly little difficulty. The food was good, dessert was awesome, and we headed back home for some rest. That brings us up to about now, with me finishing up my blog for the day and signing off for some sleep. Adios y buenos noches everybody.
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