Day one was really windy. In the morning, Mike and I went for a hike on the NaPali coast. The guidebook said the 5 mile round trip would take about 3 1/2 hours, so Mike and I wanted to see if we could do it in 2. It took us about 1:50, but we were moving. Here's a shot of our destination, a small beach where a stream enters the ocean. Too rough to go for a swim this time of year, but it's a nice senic spot.
Time to get back, we've got a flight to catch!
We had an airplane sightseeing flight around the island as one of our Christmas gifts, thanks mom and mike! We boarded the plane, and began our trip around the island in a clockwise direction. This plane is from Australia, designed for use in the outback. It was less than 1/2 year old, and used much less fuel than a helicopter, so we felt green and safe. More on the green later. The clouds were around 3000' so we couldn't see up into the canyon or any of the waterfalls.
Up we went, I was hoping to sit in the right seat, since I always wanted to be a commercial airline pilot or at least get my private license, but someone else got to due to weight balancing issues. Oh well. We go around the north west end of the island, off of the imposing cliffs of the Na Pali coast and it got very bumpy. This is where a lot of us started to feel a bit green due to the bumps! The view was nice, however, and he's a shot out of the window.
We made it around the island, and our pilot made a great touch down on runway 17 at LIH. I don't get to take many shots from this viewpoint. It reminded me of a good blog I like to follow, check out Rand the NW/DL pilot's blog here.
Rand probably hasn't used runway 17 at LIH as I believe he's used to the other runway, for larger jets. You can see the approach lights just to the left of the runway, right of the pilot's headset. There are 4 Fresnel lenses here to help the pilot see if he's coming in too high or too low. If he's on the right slope, the 2 on the left will be white, the 2 on the right will be red. In this shot, the 3 left are white, the 1 on the right is red, meaning we're a little bit high. However, the pilot corrected soon after this shot and we had a smooth touchdown in a brisk crosswind of about 25 knots. Elizabeth gave him a round of applause after touchdown!
The next day was our Zipline tour. We got to ride 9 ziplines around and over a series of trees and streams, and it was a blast! We had lunch at a swimming hole, jumping of a cliff and enjoying the scenery. Elizabeth and my mom were really scared to go, but they did just fine. Luckily, the first zipline was a short easy "bunny hill" zipline to get them warmed up. Here's my mom crusing across one of the valleys.
That was pretty much our last day without rain for the rest of the trip. The skies opened up and there was no snorkeling or scuba diving for me. We even had thunderstorms and a tornado on the island! Lots of flooding on the roads and some mudslides. Sort of a bummer. The last time I went to Kaua'i, I had bad weather too, so I think I'm done with that island for a long time. Here's a picture of the friend we had outside of our condo. He would make sure that we were out of bed every morning nice and early. I learned to put my earplugs in before going to sleep. I wanted to catch him and throw him on the BBQ, but then I got a close look at those talons! They are pretty wary anyway, so I didn't bother trying to catch him in the end.
ALOHA!
