I woke early so I got up for a quiet stroll to check out the Puukohola Heiau historical site. By the time I made it back to camp, Mat had woken. We quickly and quietly packed our gear. Today we are going to Mauna Kea beach. Hawaiian state law mandates that all beaches are public. The fancy Mauna Kea resort realized that, although they couldn't prevent non-guests from coming to their fabulous, picturesque beach, they can regulate the number of people by designating only 40 parking spots available for public beach access. These spots fill up fast so Mat and I wanted to ensure our place.
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| Early morning stroll |
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| Puukohola |
We were parked by 8:00 AM but hungry since we forwent breakfast to get here early. The resort has a nice restaurant right over the water so we hit it up for a lovely buffet breakfast. The juice and coffee were the best I ever had and the fresh tropical fruit was a treat. On top of it all was the most amazing view of the beautiful little beach. We even saw some dolphins briefly surfacing out in the ocean. After breakfast, we headed to the south end of the beach and prepare to snorkel. The snorkeling here was fabulous, so nice we ended going out twice. We saw octopus both times and got a close up view of sea turtles the second time in.
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| Tasty breakfast buffet |
The beach was so nice and relaxing that we didn't want to leave! But we had to return our rented gear by 3:30 PM and our flight to Kauai was at 6:10 PM. We left the beach and drove into Kona to return our rented gear, a quick stop at a gas station to vacuum out most of the sand and to repack our suitcases for flight. We returned the car to Enterprise (which refunded half of our gas payment since the tank was half full - these guys are awesome!) and made it to the airport. I'm just having bad luck with airport security this trip, I forgot to dump out my water bladder so security escorted me outside to dump it then had me go through security again! Everything worked out just fine and we were on our plane to Kauai.
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| Mauna Kea beach |
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| Mauna Kea beach |
A stop over in Honolulu, the stewardess announce that any passengers continuing on to (incomprehensible name inserted here) may stay on the plane. We get off the plane to find our connector flight but then discover the plane we just exited is the plane we need to take to Lihu'e. The stewardess said Lihu'e in a quiet manner, which made it incomprehensible so we exited the plane thinking we'd have to board a different one. So we promptly waited in line to reboard the plane we just got off! The flight into Kauai was packed but quick. We landed just after 8:00 PM and got our Hertz rental car, this time a white all wheel drive 2011 Subaru Impreza sedan - fun little car, and happy to have all wheel drive as a lot of Kauai hiking trails start on 4WD road, upgrading to a 4WD rental car would have cost us another $300! We headed over to Garden Island Inn to see if they had a room available. They looked packed but luckily they had one room available (and lucky for us the inn was open for only another 30 mins when we arrived)!
We were starving (hadn't eaten a meal since our fancy breakfast) so after putting our belongings in our room, we embarked on finding food. Unfortunately, it seems as though Kauai shuts down after 7:00 PM. We drove around for a while trying to find a restaurant that was open! We eventually settled for tourist-trap Duke's since it was 9:30 PM and they were open until 11:00 PM. Food was OK, going back to the room and going to sleep was even better!
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| Duke's restaurant |
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