I’m easing back into the blog world with a travelogue post about our 30th anniversary trip to Kaua’i in January. The ocean was running strong during our trip, or maybe it always does so there, and living beside it for a week made a lasting impression. It roared and crashed, splashed and clicked, slammed and screamed, hissed and hummed, nonstop, night and day. Loudly. We were able to sleep with our slider open, and use it as a superlative white noise generator. I live a quarter mile from that same ocean, yet it isn’t the same at all.

We paid a bit extra for a room close to the water and were glad of it. Below is a photo from our lanai. If you want to see a short video of the hotel grounds with me narrating, use this link: https://photos.app.goo.gl/nkZVpoCzjWY571sP8saas5

We were surprised by the relative lack of wildlife compared to California, but we did see a few interesting animals. The island is overrun by wild chickens, which run really very fast, fly occasionally, and have lots of progeny of various ages flocking about. I’m not sure I had seen an adolescent chicken before this trip. We felt lucky to get a close look at a family of nenes, familiar to all crossword solvers, and even luckier to find ourselves amid a superpod of about 200 spinner dolphins during a boat trip. We saw them spin, but weren’t able to capture it on video. A highlight for me was an endangered monk seal hauled out on the beach. There is one in the lab of the aquarium where I volunteer.

Ok, I can’t figure out how to arrange these pictures on the page, so I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which animal is which.

The main thing Kaua’i is known for today is scenery. We didn’t delve deeply into its history, but it seems to have moved to a mostly tourist-based economy, meaning a lot of the island is protected. The western shore, aka Na Pali Coast, consists of crater-rim mountains plunging to the sea, interior of which is a large canyon and then a large swamp. It is so rugged that there are no through roads between the north and south shores on that side. We took a boat tour to see the mountains and we wanted to take a hike to see the canyons, but we had to settle for a drive due to the weather.

Hmmm. It appears we did not get any pictures of the most dramatic part of Na Pali Coast! Well, if you’ve seen movies, you’ve seen it. Kaua’i has been featured in quite a few movies. One example, for the older crowd: Bali Hai in South Pacific.

I mentioned weather, and it does rain there, over 40 inches a year. It didn’t slow us down, other than discouraging  us from hiking down that one soggy trailhead, because the rain starts and stops quickly. By the time you get your raincoat on–yes, we brought those–it’s over.

It wouldn’t be The Garden Island without rain. I wouldn’t have experienced my first outdoor rain forest. When it rains, waterfalls sprout. Rain is followed by rainbows.