Kaua'i

As you may have read in an earlier post, Adam went to Kaua'i for a few days with one of his classes. He loved it so much, that he wanted to take me there, so we went for 4 days during his Spring Break. It was amazing! We didn't want to come home...ever. I thought Oahu was beautiful until we drove around Kaua'i.

After spending time getting camping permits, we went snorkeling at Po'ipu Beach. It was like swimming in an aquarium with huge fish all around. There was also a huge variety of fish.

After snorkeling and visiting Spouting Horn for a second, we drove up about 4000 feet to our campsite in Waimea Canyon. I didn't realize it could get that cold in Hawai'i. It rained for a lot of the night, but our tent is pretty good and kept us dry and kind of warm. The campsite was pretty, and we saw the stars more clearly there than anywhere before. Beautiful! Waking up to roosters wasn't the best experience ever, but it got us up and going the next morning so we could see more things.

The next morning we went another 500 feet up the mountain to the very top. When we got there, we had the most amazing view ever. We could see into the valley and part of the Na Pali Coast from where we were.

After spending a while at Waimea Canyon, we descended to explore the other parts of the island. From there, we found a nice place to sit and eat lunch and dry out our camping gear. After lunch, we went to Kipu Falls where we jumped off the waterfall and rope swing. It was soooo much fun other than the rope burn I got. We went to look for our next campsite after playing there for a while. When we got there, we decided it would to look for someplace else to stay for the night. It was on a pretty black sands beach, but there were tents of homeless people camping there permanently. When we went by the bathroom, we heard a ton of laughter, both from men and women. Apparently that was the place to hang out, drink and do who knows what else. Finally, after driving for a while, we ended up camping here:

Much better. The next day, we drove up north more and stopped by Wailua Falls on the way. It may not look very big, but for scale, the two little shapes in the water to the right of the twig sticking out are people swimming. We also stopped by the Kilauea Lighthouse lookout and watched the birds fly around.

After Wailua Falls, we went exploring some more and found our favorite beach on the island. I'm not sure what it is called, but it was pretty secluded other than the locals surfing there. There is a pretty waterfall on the way to the beach. We spent quite a while at that beach on Wednesday then again on Thursday before we left.

Here's Adam at that same beach with our rental car.

After spending time at the beach, we went to the Na Pali Coast to go hiking and snorkeling. Since it hurts my knees too much to hike very long, we only went about a half mile up the coast, but it was still a beautiful view from there. The snorkeling only lasted about 10 minutes before the lifeguard kicked everybody out because of the strong currents.

Here's another random waterfall we saw from the highway. There are waterfalls everywhere there.

On Wednesday night, we met up with some friends and stayed at the resort they were staying at. Then, in the morning, we went to Queen's Bath, a natural elevated basin that you can swim in when the conditions are right. They weren't right when we got there, so we didn't swim.

After that, we went back to our favorite beach for a while, back to Po'ipu Beach for some more snorkeling and a sweet underwater photo session (pictures coming soon) and back to Kipu Falls for some more waterfall jumping.

We also spent quite a bit of time on this trip driving around down random streets and exploring, which often brought us to some cool surprises. It was a pretty awesome trip. Not only did we get to go to a beautiful place and do a ton of fun stuff, but we got to get away together from everything and everyone for the first time in a long time. If any of you ever come to Hawai'i, I would highly recommend coming to Kaua'i for a week or so. We took many more pictures on Adam's phone that were deleted when the people at the Apple Store reset it because of problems he was having, but the pictures don't do it justice.