Reflections of My Travel

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We got up bright and early this morning to get to the airport for our flight to Kauai. When we got there and got our van, we immediately started driving up to Waimea Canyon. They call this the Grand Canyon of the Pacific and we were really excited about seeing it. It was every bit as pretty as they say. It was so green and the rocks were so red. Beautiful. And we saw more wildlife than we’ve seen on all the islands combine. By wildlife, I mean wild chickens. They were all over the place up there on top of the canyon! We drove along the canyon, pulling out at picturesque stops, and turned around once we had hit and walked around the Napali Coast a bit. I think I expected this Island to be fairly primitive since they say it is the least developed and visited of the islands. I was surprised to see that it seemed to have more and nicer towns and neighborhoods all around the coast than the other islands we’ve been to. For the most part, what little development there was on Maui was rundown and shackish. We had planned on hiking around in the canyon some but we were both a little zapped for energy so after spending the whole morning and part of the afternoon driving around and appreciating it, we went back down to the coast. We stopped at Spouting Horn Beach and watched a very nice blowhole for quite some time. It was really one of the better ones I’ve seen. or heard for that matter. And yes, there were chickens all over the beach. It makes sense, we had already been informed at the first of our trip that Kauai was the only island that the mongoose had not been introduced to so the bird population was much healthier there. I guess I just hadn’t expected the bird population to be so largely comprised of cluckers/crowers. They were everywhere and we had to watch for them when driving so as to not hit one crossing the street (why? to get to the beach, of course!). As evening approached we went back to town to get some dinner and to find a place to camp. We stopped at WalMart and there were chickens all over the parking lot. As Randal accidentally dropped some peanuts that had fallen down into one of our bags, they came flocking from all over. It was a little scary. We have found our camping spot and we are getting ready to watch another movie on our very nifty vehicle DVD player before we go to sleep.

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Today we confirmed that there’s really not much to see on the Big Island other than the live volcano and the trails in the park around it. We drove the north loop back around to Kona and then drove almost all the way back to Hilo on the Saddle Road, between the volcanos. We went up as far as the visitor’s center, where the pavement ends, on Mauna Kea but it was so cloudy it was not worth trying to get our minivan up the steep-grade, gravel road to the summit since they said there was next to no visibility up there either. We drove back down to Kona and decided to try something new to make our camping more interesting. Turns out our minivan had a DVD player so we ran into WalMart and bought a DVD. We need one of those in our XTerra. It was very neat to lay there watching a movie. And it was great surround sound, the whole van shook with bass when anything big happened. Made for a much more entertaining evening of camping (which usually consists of going straight to sleep).

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Today was mostly a rest day. Since we are apparently on this side of the island during monsoon season and it’s just been endless rain, and we stayed up until after 2100 last night trying to get pics together, it was a good day for being lazy and napping after work. Later in the afternoon, after the sun decided to come out for a few minutes, we went to a couple of local beaches to walk around a bit (waves are just too choppy to snorkel on this side right now) and then grabbed some dinner and came back. Time for bed.