• Tag Archives Kauai

  • Meeting Luke, the Clydesdale

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    We had Kashi cereal and papaya for breakfast this morning.  They no longer stock the refrigerator with absurdly expensive items and wait for appetite to increase their income, so we loaded it with stuff we want.  Much better.

    Outside Lihue we went into a shopping center and bought some supplies:  water, Zicam (for me) and yogurt.   Headed north we passed the airport and found Wailua where we turned mauka (toward the mountains) and headed up to Opeeka’a Falls.   We ate our yogurt there and discussed the day.  Kate decided we should head back toward Poipu beach and stop at the Gaylord Plantation.

    Way over-priced.  Some nice stuff, but boy they did see us coming.  We bought nothing, but did meet Luke, a Clydesdale who was on carriage duty.  What a great animal.  Gentle, soulful, big.  He reminded me, a lot, of our Irish Wolfhounds. He’s way too big to fit in the suitcase.  Darn it.

    Lunch was take-out eaten at a pavilion overlooking a long, bare expanse of Pacific.  It was high-tide so the waves lapped up further and further.  Several Bantie roosters shared the pavilion with us.  After lunch a couple of young Hawaiian girls came along and picked up the roosters who seemed to like being carried, their red-wattled heads going this way and that.

    While hunting for shells, I slipped into the water and went on, only in ankle deep water.   Found a couple of gorgeous shells, a cowrie, brown with speckles, and a spiral shell with little horns along the spirals.  A bit of beach glass worn smooth by the waves and a nice piece of drift wood.  Beach combing, for some reason, can occupy me for hours on end.  I love trudging along, looking down, finding this or that.

    After lunch we went to the visitor center of the National Tropical Botanical Garden, http://www.ntbg.org/ .  We will tour Allerton Gardens next Saturday.  They were the royal gardens when Hawai’i was a monarchy.   Around the visitor center are several garden beds with various local and endemic plants:  sugar cane, plumeria, bougenvillea, Sumatran cherry, banana, many palms.  Of the plants native to Hawai’i over 80% are endemic and all of these are under pressure from encroaching environmental change.   Most of the plants we associate with Hawai’i like palms, ginger, plumeria are not native and they have tended to crowd out the local species.

    Tonight there is a large welcome dinner for the crowd here to study infectious diseases. I’m invited. Oh, boy. 

    Later.


    📂This entry was posted in Garden Great Work Travel 📎and tagged

  • Sweatshirts from Hawai’i

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    A cool night by Kauai standards, 72.  When we drove up to Koke’e State Park, the park that includes the Waimea Canyon, the temperature dropped to 59.  With the rain it was uncomfortable.  These changes are how folks end up with so many sweatshirts from Hawai’i.

    Kate and I ate dinner overlooking the 18th green of the Grand Hyatt golf courses and some dinner plate sized yellow hibiscus.  We discussed the tendency we have to want to live where we’re vacationing:  Ely, Denver, Hawai’i. It occurred to me that a large part of this sentiment comes from relaxing together and re-connecting with the love we feel for each other.  To the extent that that feeling drives our wish to live here, it means that where we already live is best.  As Emerson said, we take ourselves with us wherever we go.

    Kate’s picking our itinerary for the weekend since it’s the only fully free time she has.  Tomorrow we head toward Lihue.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged

  • Chickens Liberated By Act of God

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    A rainy day here on Kauai.  The roosters and their flocks sought shelter under the spreading philodendron and the tall Cook pines.  Waimea Canyon, the Grand Canyon of the Pacific, hid itself in shrouds of white clouds scudding along at the 2,500 foot level.

    Hanapeppe, an artist’s colony had not had time to wake up when we pulled in hunting for lunch.  We ate at Bobbie’s, a local food restaurant.  This includes lau lau pork, locomoco, lomin and various fried foods done in a style similar to, but fattier than tempura.  The androgynous cook, think muscular and broad shouldered with a cute hair do and hot pants, asked if we’d ordered enough food.  This because #8 and #9, our orders, came with a lot of food.

    Hanapeppe, off Highway 50, the main and only highway headed toward Waimea Canyon, had the look of old Hawai’i, a look fondly remembered in guide books, but, since its primary ingredients seem to be rural poverty, I suspect not much missed by the locals.

    The bantam roosters and hens found their liberation in the 1991 Hurricane I’niki.  The winds tore open the chicken huts and yards, freeing most of the islands population of chickens.  Now they roam everywhere.  At the Big Save in Port Allen, as I put groceries in the trunk, a rooster ran by me, headed to another place with great determination.  It surprised me.

    We’ll dine tonight at Yum Cha, an Asian fusion restaurant on the golf course. 


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged

  • Island Time

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Sunny this AM. Warm.  Birds twittering.  Kids voices, giggles, then splashes. 

    The lanai here is private and large with comfortable chairs.  A great spot to read, meditate.

    Kate has two days without classes so we’re trying to figure out what to do today.  Good rest last night, we both slept till 8 AM.

    I’m on island time.


    📂This entry was posted in Travel 📎and tagged

  • A True Hotspot

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Night.  Rain, steady.  “Not good when you have to mow the grass and cut the weeds,” said a Japanese maintenance person here at the Grand Hyatt Kauai. 

    Kauai is another country, the oldest of the main Hawai’an Islands.   It lies furthest to the west, in roughly the path the mid-Pacific plate has crossed over the hotspot now under Kiluaea and Mauna Loa on the Big Island.

    It is far from the oldest.  The trail of islands whose formation came on the hotspot stretches to the north and east.

    The Hyatt, too, is another world.  It has 52 acres of resort including a PGA championship golf course, two wings of rooms and 9 restaurants plus pools, tide pools, and an archaeological excavation on the grounds.

    Our lanai here faces the pools and the grounds, but does have an ocean view though nowhere near as good as the one at the Westin.  Still, there are compensations.  The Stevenson Library is a bar cum sushi bar cum jazz club.  Sounds good.

    Flew here this afternoon in a twin prop plane with wings on top.  When I stood on the runway getting ready to board, I felt like I was in Casablanca.  This was two seats on either side of the middle aisle.  One stewardess and pilots who looked like they might play in high school band.  We had a flight delay because of a switch on the instrument  panel had gone out, but the captain said, “Since it belongs to the de-icing sensor, I don’t think it should impede our progress.”

    More tomorrow.


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