4:37 PM here.\u00a0 81.\u00a0 Sunny.\u00a0 Clear.\u00a0 Just another…<\/p>\n
Kate and I just got back from a trip to Waimea Canyon.\u00a0 Clear this time.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0Along the way we stopped at the Kauai Coffee Company Visitor Center and Museum.\u00a0 Talk about underwhelming.\u00a0 And not just because I shifted to tea a while back.<\/p>\n
The video explained how they took a 3,400 acre sugarcane farm with 400 workers and transformed it into a coffee estate with the same acreage and only 57 workers.\u00a0 The magic ingredient?\u00a0 Mechanization.\u00a0 They have designed mechanical pickers and pruners.\u00a0 The pruners are necessary because the pickers can only pick coffee berries at 4+ feet and below.\u00a0 With the mechanization they can harvest 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.\u00a0\u00a0 This is, I got the impression, a good thing.\u00a0 Fertilization, on Kauai’s rich volcanic soil, and irrigation, because Kauai’s rains come at an inconvenient time of year, winter, round out the why did I stop here in the first place list.<\/p>\n
We also stopped at Waimea Plantation Cottages for lunch.\u00a0\u00a0 We stayed there in 1998 and Kate has not forgotten a significant fact.\u00a0 NO air conditioning.\u00a0 When asked if they were air conditioned, our waiter looked\u00a0bemused, “No.\u00a0 No AC.\u00a0 You have to\u00a0go to a hotel for that.\u00a0 Or, you could stay in the cabins up in Kokee State Park.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Which reminds me that when Kate needed meds late in the evening, I asked the concierge whether there was a 24-hour pharmacy.\u00a0 She looked at me with another bemused expression and said, “This is Hawai’i.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Waimea Canyon had its on prettiest 5.1 million year old face today.\u00a0 Red cliffs, sinuous streams and water falls so thin they get buffeted by the wind.\u00a0 We drove on to the Kalalau lookout, near the end of the road, got out and went over to the railing which looks down into the Kalalau valley.\u00a0 Ancient Hawai’ians lived there and in the 60’s and 70’s so did back-to-the-land types.\u00a0 The state moved them out a while ago.<\/p>\n
Spectacular doesn’t described this lookout.\u00a0 Knife edged walls of eroded stone creat a u-shaped valley with a beach and ocean view at the northern end and a steep 2,000 foot cliff face at the southern.\u00a0 The lookout is atop this cliff so the view shows the valley below and the Pacific stretched out to the horizon.\u00a0 It is in this valley where much of the Jurassic Park movies were filmed.<\/p>\n
We’re back now for the evening and night, then we check out tomorrow morning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
4:37 PM here.\u00a0 81.\u00a0 Sunny.\u00a0 Clear.\u00a0 Just another… Kate and I just got back from a trip to Waimea Canyon.\u00a0 Clear this time.\u00a0 \u00a0Along the way we stopped at the Kauai Coffee Company Visitor Center and Museum.\u00a0 Talk about underwhelming.\u00a0 And not just because I shifted to tea a while back. The video explained how … Continue reading Its Prettiest 5.1 Million Year Old Face<\/span>