Kauai Day 5

Since it was Sunday and we wanted to go to 9:00 church, we had a lazy morning in our little house. Dan actually slept in and even though I woke up early, I enjoyed spending the early hours reading in bed.

The Kapa'a meetinghouse was literally right across the road from our house, so we got ready and walked over right at 9:00. The main room was full (it was very small) so we went into a little overflow room on the side of the seats on the stand. We enjoyed the familiarity of an LDS sacrament meeting with some subtle Hawaiian differences. They even sang the Aloha song to a local newly married couple that had just come back from their honeymoon. We left after sacrament meeting with probably half of the congregation that I assumed were tourists like us.

We went back to the house to change for another nearby hike, this one much shorter and easier than Nounou Mountain so it felt like a good Sunday activity. We found the street parking for Ho'opi Falls and hiked the short distance through beautiful green foliage. There are two waterfalls, and the first was perfect for some waterfall jumping. (For Dan, not me.)

Two young families hiked up after we'd been there for a while and Dan convinced them it was perfectly safe so the husbands jumped in as well.  We said goodbye and kept going towards the second waterfall. One part of the trail was just a jumble of tree branches (and maybe some roots) growing stick straight towards the ground. It was so strange looking!

 We both agreed this hike had a familiar feel - almost like Escalante but very, very green.

 We found the steep short trail down to the bottom waterfall and took off our shoes and socks to enjoy the water.

It was cold water and it had started sprinkling on us so I stayed on the rocks, but Dan had to try the rope swing and swim in the pond.

I noticed a family arrive at the top of the falls and lingered there for a long time. They eventually came down to the bottom too where the wife told me, "We tried to give you newlyweds some time alone before we came down here!". I laughed and told her not to worry about it but didn't want to go into the fact that we'd been married 10 years. Every always assumed we were newlyweds and it was easier to just laugh instead of elaborate. Dan, on the other hand, liked to shock people and would always mention our three kids in passing conversation.

Another panorama attempt. Apparently I'm not very good at them.

We hiked back in a light rain and it felt so good. We drove to the Happy Taco Truck in Kapa'a for some good carnitas and decent fish tacos, and grabbed a bowl of cut papaya from a sidewalk market on the way back to the house. We sat on our porch to watch the rain and then decided to take the beach cruisers (also part of the property) out for an easy ride on the paved path along the ocean. I brought my binoculars because we'd heard so many people talking about all the whale sightings, but we never saw anything.

We found a nice place to sit and called the girls at the Browers and facetimed for a bit. Lorna had picked them up that day and while Ellie was completely fine, my mom warned her that Olive woke up from her nap with a fever. But other than that they were all happy, and we enjoyed talking to them while taking in this view:

 After hanging up with the girls, we sat for a while longer watching the ocean, and then two guys came over to us asking, "is that a seal there? Is that why you guys are sitting here?" Apparently we'd been staring at a Hawaiian monk seal for the past half hour and hadn't even noticed her there. These two men were avid seal watchers. One of them left after a while, and the other sat and talked with us for over an hour while we waited for the tide to come up and force the seal to move.

We learned all sorts of interesting things about the monk seal population and it was a strange and funny way to spend an hour. We eventually gave up and biked back to our house. We walked down the road for dinner at Mermaids Cafe, where Dan had some good noodles but my ahi wrap was truly disappointing.

The top thing on our Kauai list was hiking part of the Kalalau Trail, and we knew we were running out of time to do it so we decided Monday was the day. We made sure we had everything ready and a plan for what to buy for snacks and lunch on the trail, and then went to bed excited for our adventure the next day!