Anniversary Trip - Day 6

Waimea Canyon is on the agenda for today! As well as some geocaching too!

Waimea is the "Grand Canyon" of the Pacific and is a very popular tourist attraction! Someone at one of the lookouts overheard we were from Arizona and asked us if it (Waimea Canyon) compared to the Grand Canyon (obviously, they had never seen the Grand Canyon!).... 

We tried to answer as politely as possible, and did for the most part... We did tell them that it was a different kind of beauty and they should definitely see the Grand Canyon for themselves!

(There might have been an uncontrolled response before we answered though...)

There are a couple of places to pull over and see the Waimea Ditch that was used to divert water to the sugar cane fields on the drive up the canyon.

The canyon certainly is beautiful! A lot of colors and layers!

A couple of beautiful waterfalls!

 At the last stop before you have to turn around and go back, is "One of The Wettest Spots on Earth"!

 Mount Waiʻaleʻale averages about 452" of rain a year!! We are from Arizona so we had a hard time grasping this!

Just a "short hike" (see the peak behind Doug?) and you can stand on top of the mountain that sits in this beautiful tropical spot!

We love the people that were willing to take a picture of us! 

 We returned the favor as much as possible!

 

At one of the overlooks, I spotted this unique looking tree!

 It made for a perfect photo op!

We started geocaching after we were finished with the canyon. I may have mentioned before that I love some of the places we see when geocaching that we may not have seen otherwise! We were going to skip this next stop but there was a geocache there!

This is what is left of a Russian Fort that was built on the island! If you would like to know more, here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Fort_Elizabeth

It's history is interesting (to me at least)

Another geocache had us going down to the beach behind the fort, where the Waimea River flows out to the ocean. 

Here is one of the interesting signs we found:

We stop for another cache when I had a "fly by"! Several flocks of parakeets flew by me!

I managed to get off a shot or two!

The places that geocaching takes us are incredible!

Another thing we may have missed if not for geocaching! The Hanapepe Swinging Bridge!

We had to cross the bridge and go along the canal in order to find this cache!

We had been told about a place to eat, called Da Crack... One of the best finds!

You walk up to a window to order, no tables, and you could add anything you wanted to a burrito, taco, nachos, etc! The "kitchen" was literally 6' wide and ran along the length of the building! The picture above the window:

LOL! 

Doug ordered a burrito and I got the nachos! We had enough food to feed half the chickens on Kauai! It was so much food! But, it was delicious!

We took our dinner to a pull off along the coast and enjoyed our meal as the sun set.

As we are watching, I spotted something in the waves. A turtle maybe?

The only sunset we got to see because we were mostly on the east side of the island.

Anniversary Trip - Day 5 (part II)

I decided to divide this day into two parts. There was a lot of pictures and I am really, really controlling myself to not post ALL the pictures we took! (Unless you want to see them?) 

After our helicopter tour, Doug and I decide to go back to the gardens where the luau was held. I am so glad we did! You may remember that we attended the luau at Smith Family Garden? When we arrived, we payed our $6/each (well worth it) ticket to enter. The lady hands Doug a bag of bird food!

Well, this became a favorite part of the day for us! As Doug walked along (before he started handing out the goodies), I looked behind us and noticed we had a "following"....

Doug started gathering more "admirers" as he starts dropping some of the treats!

We came to the area where the luau was held and decided to explore a little more here.

There is a beautiful bridge that crosses over a partial moat. You can tell Doug went ahead of me...(notice the foreground)

As we cross the bridge, we notice a fish (who would have guessed that know us!) in a pocket of water. What was unusual, was that there didn't seem to be a way to the main part of the pond! There was a ridge of dirt/sand between the fish and the rest of the pond.  Well....

 The fish promptly turned on his side and swam over the ridge! Clever little fish! I bet he's done that before!

This garden is one of the more beautiful places on the island! The scenery was breathtaking!

Doug poses by the Aku Aku head (I think we are still on Kaua'i?)

Doug discovers that all he has to do is hold out his hand with some treats....

These little birds didn't care if there was another one already there! They were piled 2 and 3 deep!

And, of course, I had to do it too!

The Gardens are home to over 20 types of fruit, bamboo groves and lots and lots of flowers! Oh, and birds! 

 This is a Christmas Tree Palm with it's fruit!

And my favorite fruit, coffee!! ;)

There were hanging lobster claw,

Lady Di Heliconia

Queen Emma Lily and even a

MONEY Tree!! 

A Pacific Golden Plover was just one of the species (besides chickens) we spotted.

Another Red Crested Cardinal,

We even were treated to a duck and her babies!

Doug managed to get the young ones to be brave enough to come see what he had. Mom was not falling for it though!

We come around a corner and notice that some people ahead of us (we pretty much had the gardens to ourselves up to this point) had stopped and were taking pictures!

Of this handsome guy!

As beautiful as this fella was, we didn't see a female (peahen). Males usually spread their beautiful plumage to attract a mate! Which, we were pretty sure wasn't one of us!

Remember all those "fans" Doug had attracted? Well, I guess this guy was afraid of the little ones! He kept backing away from the crowd!

The peacock was semi-climatic to the rest of the day! But we did see some more interesting flowers.

Calotropis gigantea (crown flower)

Don't be too impressed, I looked it up! ;)

 

False Banana Flower (we didn't see any false bananas though) 

The bush these flowers were on, was called a Mickey Mouse Plant. Because my daughter and her husband love going to Disneyland, I thought I would take a picture to send to them. I was slightly disappointed that it didn't look like Mickey Mouse!

There was a cute little pond that had lilies growing.

Even a pink one!

Oh! And we found the peahen! She was hiding toward the front of the gardens!

Stay tuned for more!

Anniversary Trip - Day 5 (part I)

First, I want to apologize for the delay in updating the blog! (for any that may be upset... ;) ) Unfortunately, life will interfere (like getting taxes done!)

We are ready for our rescheduled helicopter tour (Blue Hawaiian Helicopters) of the island! 

(Kauai, in case you forgot)

It is still windy but not as bad. It is earlier in the morning so a lot of shadows (I'm apologizing ahead of time)

Our pilot was awesome! Asking us where we are all from (there are 5 of us inside + pilot). He also would crack jokes as we went. They played music for us in the headphones, not too loud, and made it really enjoyable! (at least for me). We were given mikes so if we wanted to ask the pilot questions, we could.

I will only give you a couple of the highlights. However, if you are interested, we were given a CD with our entire trip on it! (We've all heard the jokes about sitting through a slide show of vacation pictures, LOL)

We fly over Nawiliwili Bay! When Doug and I had driven by here, there was a very large cruise ship sitting in it!

The pilot then takes us up the Huleia Stream, telling us about the area; the largest private land owners, the Robinson Family, and the second largest, Steve Case! That name sound familiar? It didn't to me either (it may have to you...) but we were told he was a co-founder of AOL!
One of the sites we flew over and we didn't get a picture of until later, was Menehune Fishpond. It is the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark! This pond has a great history to it! If you type (or copy and paste) it to your search engine, you will get a lot of pages to go to! Just about all of them are the same.

We flew over some lush, green areas (something Arizonans don't see very often!)

And, we saw quite a few waterfalls! One of the more well known ones is Manawaiopuna Falls, or Jurassic Falls. It is in several scenes in Jurassic Park!

You can get a tour to the falls, but it is privately owned and they use a different helicopter company.

One of the highlights of visiting Kauai is the Napali Coast! A lot of people go to the island just to see these cliffs! Although our tour was early in the morning (I would highly recommend later in the day to do this tour)  and the shadows made it a little difficult to get really good pictures, it was still well worth seeing!

As we flew along the coastline, we came to another famous site, (at least for movie enthusiasts!),
Honopu Beach beautiful! We could easily see why it is picked for films! The movie you may have remembered seeing this beach & Arch? Pirates of the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides!

The scale of this Arch is hard to imagine without actually seeing it for yourself! But I can give you some idea, the arch measures about 65' high and 200' wide! The waterfall beside it? About 100 feet!

We see a lot more things (mostly green with a lot of water!) that we took tons of pictures of but these are the highlights! We had a great time and would do this tour again but maybe at a later time of day.

Our Day didn't end there! Stay tuned for Part II!