First off, I’d like you to meet someone …


I’ve dubbed this little bugger (and that’s really not what I was calling him) “Karma.” Remember what I said about yesterday and the son of a guns crowing and waking Bob up? Ha Ha Ha. Guess who heard him this morning? And it’s not just one. Oh noooooo. They crow back and forth at each other having a bloody conversation! It’s a whole damn convention of roosters everywhere you go! Bob calls them Hawaii’s squirrels. We have squirrels everywhere. Hawaii has chickens everywhere. I’ll take the squirrels, they’re much quieter. About now I’m really feeling some chicken soup, chicken pot pie, fried chicken, chicken casserole … etc. You get my drift. Bob even wants a Kaua’i shirt with a chicken on it. Can you believe that crap? My husband wants to wear a bloody rooster! He saw a guy with a rooster on his shirt and has been on the hunt ever since. I never would’ve thought. On to the real journaling …

Would you believe we got up early this morning? I swear I am so looking forward to sleeping in. (Good luck with that with all these damn roosters everywhere you go.) But ya gotta do what ya gotta do right? It was encouraging to see some blue sky this morning so we were hopeful the views from the top of the canyon would be good. When Bob went to the office to check out he came back with some funny ha ha ear plugs for the damn roosters. For real. These are pics I’ve taken of roosters everywhere we went today! Just today. I told you, they’re literally everywhere.


Off to find something quick for breakfast (that was challenging), we ended up back at the little spot where we got smoothies last night and repeated our order with those yummy mango, guava, passionfruit smoothies.

The 18 mile drive up the canyon is slow and winding. Bob had read, and we had been told by others, to drive straight to the top no matter how badly you want to stop and take pictures on the way up. The fog rolls in early and the earlier you get to the top the better the views will be. I can tell you it was a long 18 miles, but the views were fabulous! There weren’t many cars on the road or at the lookouts before 8am. LOL Imagine that. But we beat the crowds! And the fog. Mostly. Here’s some of my faves (I tried to put these in a scrapbook page format, it just didn’t work for these images):


When I took the following shot, I really snapped it just to show how stupid these yewts were being, having climbed over the railing going out on the edge just to get that cool shot. But after I looked at it, I liked how it gives perspective on how huge this canyon is. After all, it is called the Grand Canyon of the Pacific. Have I already said that? I can’t remember.


By the time we got back down to the bottom our smoothies were long gone. We found a little cafe called Grinds that sounded promising – I really needed coffee. You’d think, or at least I did, that a place named “Grinds” would be a cool little coffee shop. It wasn’t. The food was ok but nothing to write home about. The coffee wasn’t so good either. I was more than ready for this next stop …

The Kaua’i Coffee Company was just down the street. I’d been looking forward to this for days. It’s a really cool company – no GMOs, they source locally and do everything (except decaffeinate the beans, they’re sent to Canada where they use a patented water process to decaffeinate them) right here on the island. Did you know coffee beans come from cherries? Go figure! We didn’t either. The skins and flesh from the cherries are put in a compost pile to be used for fertilizer the following year, they aren’t even eaten. Wonder what they taste like. Kaua’i Coffee has 3,100 acres and 4 million trees. They’re the largest coffee company in the United States. They’ve got this thing down pat. I walked away with some regular roast, some chocolate macadamia nut and some banana but cream. I can’t wait to get these bags home and make both hot and iced coffee with them!

Bob placated me by going to Poipu (pronounced Poy-ee-poo) Beach just so we could say we’ve seen it. It’s the most popular beach down south and it’s supposed to be a hot snorkeling spot. So far we really haven’t seen any beaches that take our breath away like we thought we would. The beaches we’ve seen so far are either too rocky to swim, very narrow, very little and therefore very crowded, or the water just looks dirty. The Doc was right. Surfers are out all over the place. The surf is way too rough to get in any decent snorkeling so we’ve accepted that but it would be nice to find a beach to plant and relax now that we’ll be here for a few days. So we (or I) wanted to really see Poipu Beach for myself to see if it matched up with the image I had in my head. It didn’t. For it to be “the” swimming/snorkeling beach of the south it was pretty small for one and the beach itself was pretty narrow. Not a place I’d want to hang out for a week. I’m sure most of the time it’s much calmer than this. Like the Doc said, it’s been rough! It’s hard to see how rough the waves are in the pics but trust us they’re rough.


At this point Bob is done. He’s been at the wheel for the best part of the last two days. He’s ready to get back to the condo and plant for a few days. We both are. It was mid afternoon when we got back. Didn’t take much to unpack – we didn’t take much with us for only a night. We hung around, watching the sun and clouds to see if there was any possibility of color tonight – wasn’t looking good. Bob called and cancelled our boat tour of the Napoli Coast for Monday morning. Between the weather we’ve seen and what’s predicted, we’re kind of running scared. I have no desire to get out there and get sick because of being tossed around so much. So since we cancelled the boat tour, we caved and booked a helicopter tour for Wednesday morning. Exciting! I’ve never been on a helicopter before! I’m trying to get reservations to tour a chocolate farm Monday morning. We’ll see how that works out. By the time we did all that it was time to drive down into Hanalei to check out the pier, town, beach and restaurants. We were hoping Hanalei Beach would be the one that would make us want to stay. Sigh, it didn’t. We saw a couple of restaurants that looked crowded from so parked and got out to look at the menus. Son of a gun the first one we looked at had a wild caught shrimp salad with organic greens!! Jackpot!! We haven’t had a salad since we love home! I opted for a frou frou (is that how you spell that?) drink – Stay at Hanalei – with vodka, rum and fresh juices and Bob got a beer. Our server was a trip. Mickey from Denver, number 8 of 10 kids, is living her dream to live in Hawaii. She had a great laugh and happy, energetic personality. Salad was good too. Oh and by the way, it was raining again. LOL



Back at the condo we just chilled, looking at pics from the day and I worked on journaling.

Tomorrow’s another day!