Day 1 - Introduction
Kauai is an amazing island. It's one of the oldest of the Hawaiian islands, so no, there are no active volcanos there. However, it has some of the most impressive signs of erosion I've ever seen. (Okay, I haven't seen the Grand Canyon yet, it's on my list.) Lava rock (which all the Hawaiian islands are made up of) is extremely soft so it erodes rather quickly. For instance, Waimea Canyon is much younger in geological terms than the Grand Canyon, but it's just as deep (although not as wide). Another incredible feature of Kauai is the Na Pali coast. Na Pali means "The Cliffs" in Hawaiian which really trivializes the immensity and grandness of them. Because of the Na Pali coast, Waimea Canyon, and the Alakai Swamp (VERY sticky mud) there is no road that connects the North and West shore. To get from one end of the road to the other is about a 2 hour drive. And it's an impressive drive at that.
If you're considering a trip to Kauai, I have some recommendations. The best guidebook I found was the Ultimate Guidebook to Kauai (the blue book). The best trail/hikes guidebook I came across was the Kathy Morey book, Hikes, Trails, and Strolls on the Garden Island. Both are extremely helpful and have good recap histories of Kauai as well as pronunciation guides to Hawaiian. As for where to stay, it depends on what you want. We chose to stay on the East Shore because it was the most centrally located. That worked really well since we wanted to see everything. The North shore is more lush, although it rains more often, and the South shore is much drier and has the most resorts. If you want more recommendations, feel free to email me, I have a lot more where these came from.
Our flight was 6 hours long from Seattle to Honolulu, with a 20 minute jump from there to Lihue, Kauai. There are very few pictures from the first day because of this.
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Our trip started VERY early in the morning (4:45am to be exact) and probably
the only good thing about getting up that early was seeing the sunrise over
Mt. Rainier before we left.
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After 6 hours, we finally reached Honolulu. Here's a picture of it from the
air. It was pretty cloudy (and a LOT of turbulance on our journey!) but you
can see a bit of Honolulu poking out between the clouds.
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Another view as we came in for a landing. You can see how clear the water is,
it was similarly clear on Kauai. Kauai has a lot fewer people ~60,000, so
the aerial views tend to include a LOT more green, and fewer houses.
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Finally! We arrived. We stayed at Lae Nani condos ("Beautiful Point of Land")
which I would definitely stay at again. This is the view from our lanai. We
were in a 1 bedroom/1.5 bath condo and the only bad thing about it was the
neighbors who were only there for a couple of days. They actually have daily
maid service! Woo Hoo. There's also a large pool that you can't see here but
was just around the corner. It was wonderful every morning listening to the
ocean and all the tropical sounding song birds.
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All photos copyright Anne Sullivan