After breakfast on Friday, we made our way up to Waimea Canyon, the "Grand Canyon of the Pacific." With all of the cloud cover over the islands, I wondered how much we would get to see, but it turns out that the edge of the clouds were just moving across the west portions of Kauai.
I somehow missed the more civilized road up to the canyon, and ended up taking the super winding, sometimes single lane, road with the abandoned burned car on it. That was certainly an adventure. But eventually we got to the biggest observation point of the canyon, and the cloud cover was minimal. It's absolutely breathtaking. Even though I had been there before, it's still hard to believe it's real. You don't appreciate the scope of it until one of the helicopters go flying through it.
We worked our way all the way to the top, stopping at the various look-out points, the little museum, and photographing the wild chickens all over the place. From the top, we very briefly got a break in the clouds to see down through the Na'Pali coast and down to the ocean. I sort of regret that Diana will not have a chance to see the coast by way of boat or chopper, but I think it would be a priority when we return.
I really struggled with the cold thing on the descent from the canyon. You come down about 3,000 feet in a couple of miles and my ears were horribly blocked. Not a good feeling.
Between Waimea and Poipu Beach, we stopped at the Kauai Coffee Company's little visitor center, and did their short walking tour. Coffee is so weird, and I didn't know the beans came in pairs in "cherries" that were mechanically separated. Pretty interesting stuff, even for a non-coffee drinker. It was neat to see the machine that shakes the cherries from the trees.
We stopped in Koloa again on the way back, and had lunch at a little place called Tomkat's. Like a lot of things in Hawaii, it's actually open and outdoors, and stray cats walk around between the tables. They're very well behaved and seem to just gravitate to my cat lady wife. :)
Again, by this point in the afternoon, I needed a nap. I felt pretty awful, and emotionally frustrated at the limitations that this bug was causing me. The timing just could not suck more.
We decided for dinner to return to Yum Cha, the Asian restaurant over in the golf course's club house. Unfortunately, this time, the food was pretty terrible. I got the same thing, the Mandarin chicken, and got something bone-like in it. Diana had the same dish, and just didn't like it because there was so much dark meat. We were completely disappointed. They ended up comping the meal. Since Diana had so little of hers, we stopped in the Italian restaurant in the hotel itself, and she had gnocchi. I just made an off-the-cuff remark about how this was dinner take two to explain why I wasn't eating, and they ended up comping that meal just because. Reminds me of the stories from the Ritz hotels where you can get free stuff if you bitch. That was not our intention, but I won't complain.
We ended the evening by parking on a swing down on the beach. You could see the light of the torches flicker on the waves as they broke, and the clouds broke up enough to finally see that stunning Kauai sky. I think the star count is even greater than it is on the mainland when viewing from nowhere Indiana. Simply amazing. Nature will never disappoint you on Kauai.
The Napali coast views for us were covered in clouds when we first got up there, it was unreal. A white layer thirty feet in front of us. We went for a short hike down into the swamp and we came back we were blessed with a clearing in the clouds for about twenty minutes and a view to die for. We took a boat cruise along the coast and it was incredible. You are absolutely right, you don't appreciate the scale until you see a heli fly though it.