Merry Christmas to all who celebrate! Yesterday was our first full day in Hawaii and we got right to it. I was up first, as always, but came downstairs to work on the blog so I wouldn’t wake Ash or Vasco. I sat here in this corner of their coffee shop, patiently waiting for it to be open at 5:30am. It was about 4am when I got here.
But by 5:30 Ash had joined me just as I got the blog up so his timing was great.
At 6am the full breakfast buffet was open, so we moved to that area next door. It was pretty standard fare, nothing to write home about! We did catch a great sunrise though. Like other tropical places we’ve been, everything here is very open – lot a lot of doors or walls even, you just walk outside.
Vasco came down about 7am and joined us. We had laid out a plan for how to spend our time the evening before: Tuesday would be the south shore and up to Waimea Canyon. This image gives you an idea of where we were on the island. Our hotel is above Lihue on the right. We headed west to Waimea and then up into the interior.
We made it to our first lookout about 9:30am.
Really stunning views. We stayed here a bit and just enjoyed the scenery. This was the only thing we were doing today so weren’t in a hurry at all.
After the stop, we made our way to the Waimea Canyon Trail for a hike. It was about 2.5 miles round trip. The hiking was moderate, some of it quite steep, and a lot of up and down, which is preferable to me than all down then all up or vice versa.
Most of it was quite woodsy, as captured by the photo above on the left. And on the right, a wild chicken. We’d seem so many of them we did some reading up on them: depending on the source you come across, it’s estimated there are 4x as many chickens on Kauai as there are people, and most of them run wild. The already large population exploded in the 90s when a hurricane destroyed some chicken coops. Seriously.
There was another couple here who we’d talked with a bit on the way up and we took each other’s photos.
We stopped for some wave watching on the way back to town.
We stopped for lunch in the town of Waimea a little after noon at Island Taco. I’d been joking for weeks that we were having tacos for Christmas so this seemed fitting. Although we all got burritos! Ash and I got ahi, Vasco got pork. All very good.
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On our way back we stopped at the Kauai Coffee Company. The hotel’s activities person had told us about it the day before – the largest coffee plantation in the world – and I was interested. But the tours were $50 a person. Crazy. We weren’t THAT interested. But we learned a few things:
- Yes, largest in the world – 3100 acres,
- 4 million trees
- Produced over 50% of Hawaii’s annual crop
For the next couple of hours after we got back we just hung out around the beach of the hotel. Vasco got his highly desired tanning time. It occurred to me I can’t remember the last time we just chilled for a bit while on vacation.
Ash and Vasco dressed for dinner. We took this in the hotel lobby before we headed out about 6:15pm. We went to a restaurant down the street at a resort called Oasis on the Beach.
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This was a holiday special fixed price menu, at what I thought was a ridiculous price. So, we were hoping it was going to be really special, but it didn’t live up to its price tag.
The only dish I’ll talk about is the deconstructed beef wellington that Vasco and I got. That was really tasty, and a surprising amount of food. We both enjoyed it, and it somewhat made up for the mincemeat pie we each had as or appetizer which was underwhelming.
And that was our Merry Christmas Eve. I worked on the blog a little after dinner, but everyone was in bed by 10pm.
Today we are doing the north shore, which I understand is a completely different terrain, so come back tomorrow to see what that’s about.
We are incredibly blessed to live such a rich life and to be able to share it all with you. We wish all of the you the best of the holidays and hope you’re safe and happy whatever you are doing.
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Looks like your having a fabulous trip guys!!