Sunday February 15 - the last day

Sunday dawned with clear skies.  With the lack of clouds, the sunrise wasn't as much of an enticing photography subject, however the moon was still out when I wandered down to the beach, so I grabbed a few pre-dawn shots.

The original plan had been to eat breakfast in the room, however since we didn't have to be out until 10, we figured we had time to go back to the Olympic Cafe for a full meal and fresh coffee.  I had the oatmeal again, and we got into a conversation with another table full of tourists while we waited for our food.
After a satisfying meal, we drove back to the condo for our mad-dash shower and packing.  It took a bit of scrambling and creative shoving of clothing, but in the end we walked out the door of the condo at exactly 10:00 a.m. on the dot (though the bags were not quite airplane ready, as we grabbed everything out in shopping bags just to get out the door on time and figured we would sort out the details of packing later)
Our flight wasn't scheduled to leave until nearly midnight, so we had pretty much a full day to wander around, so long as we didn't get into any water-related fun.  We turned right and drove north up the island, stopping at lookouts along the way and soaking in the scenery and watching surfers in the distance. We contemplated trying a new restaurant for lunch, but we enjoyed eating at the Dolphin so much, and felt like we should take advantage of the perfectly blue skies, so we took a table outside at the Dolphin in Hanalei.

I enjoyed the lunch salad with grilled ono

From lunch, we continued up the highway back to the northern-most driving point, Ke'e Beach.  While we'd had no trouble parking the week prior, today the entire area was jam-packed.  Given the crowds, photography would prove to be difficult so we back-tracked down the highway to the town of Hanalei.  We hopped out in the shopping area to pick up a few snacks, some coffee mugs from the local roaster, and of course a shave ice for G.

While G enjoyed her shave ice, I wandered the grounds seeking out these cute little chestnut mannikin.  They are common, but I found their unusual blue beaks to be exotic enough :)

Heading back towards Kapa'a, we stopped off at another viewpoint and found a flat area of easily accessible tide pools and I hauled the gear down to do some shooting.

Tidepools from the fisheye... clever!

While we meandered the tidepools, we were approached by a volunteer who told us that a monk seal was asleep just on the other side of the rocky outcropping.  The volunteers keep track of the seals, and when there is a report of a seal sleeping on the beach, they race out to surround the seal with "do not disturb" signs.  The volunteer invited me to come down by her station to take pictures of the sleeping seal.

After quite a long photo shoot of the seal (she kept moving around and I grabbed a lot of great shots from different angles) we headed back up to the car to move on, then D spotted spouts of water off in the distance.  Whales!  I figured we were safe enough to whale watch from the cliffs (they won't ram the cliffs, right?) so I plugged my 300mm onto the camera, along with my teleconverter, used the door frame as a brace and pointed out to the spouts.

No joke, I took about 800 photos, most of which are simply a blue horizon line.  I put my camera on rapid-fire so that I would be more likely to capture the action... I have a lot to delete, and none of these are worthy of blowing up to poster size, but they are a great memory and I got some pretty decent action considering how far off in the distance they were.

Fin-slapping the water

Two fins slapping together

Whale tail!

As the afternoon stretched into evening, I got my fill of shoreline whale watching, and we loaded up the gear and headed towards the airport.  We'd contemplated having dinner back at Oasis on the Beach, but it felt bitter-sweet to park there again after having checked out already, and I wanted to be closer to the airport, so we drove down to Lihue instead.  There were several restaurants within walking distance of the big Marriott, so we just parked there and meandered around.  We decided to try out Kukui's Bar and Grill located pool-side in the Marriott.

It is a beautiful setting, the pool has these massive Roman style columns and bridges over the water, however there seemed to be a disconnect between the hostess and wait staff, as we were seated and had nobody acknowledge us for at least half an hour (and the hostess had disappeared for most of that time, so we couldn't find her to ask her where our waiter might be)  He was apologetic, but it was obvious to us that he was being seated with too many tables at once, and since we had a good 3 hours to eat dinner and drive maybe 3 miles, we weren't too worried.

My dinner was really great, I had a nice salad to start with, and the grilled opah for dinner

They didn't have balsamic vinegar, so they brought me a balsamic reduction... which I happen to like, but makes for a sweet and sticky salad dressing.

SUCH good fresh fish everywhere we went!

After dinner it was time to face the reality of having to travel back home.  We pulled all the luggage out of the car and rearranged everything into checked luggage vs. carryon, calculated who would carry what where, and finally resigned ourselves to going to the airport.  Our flight had been delayed, out to about 12:30 a.m., so after having the bags quadruple checked for any produce, we settled ourselves in a quiet corner of the seating area and waited.  

Boarding was a relatively swift process, and aside from the girls behind us trying to use D's seat as a footrest (which he quickly remedied with a loud "You wanna stop kicking me in the head please?") almost all the passengers spent most of the flight attempting to sleep sitting up like sardines in a can.

It is, honestly, quite miserable to try to sleep on a plane on an overnight flight... but had we opted for the day flight we would have missed the seal and the whales and everything else we managed to squeeze into the last day.  In the end, sitting on a plane for 5.5 hours will be uncomfortable whether you are sleeping or awake, and once we got home we all just crashed for a decent nap in our own beds anyway.  

And as I have 77GB of images to work on, I'll leave this blog for now and get to editing these, and the shots from Jamaica last year.  

Thanks for coming along!

Tuesday February 10

One of the big To Do's on my Kauai list was a visit to the Kilauea Lighthouse and National Wildlife Refuge at the northernmost tip of the island. This morning we all woke up early, had a quick breakfast in the room, then packed up the gear and headed north to Kilauea.  Along the way we stopped at a cute little coffee shop to grab a couple of iced cold brew coffees.

We arrived to the lookout over the lighthouse about 20 minutes before the park opened, so we hopped out of the car to take a few photos of the view looking out towards the lighthouse.

I also encountered a couple of Nenes... (another check on my Kauai bucket list) Nenes are the state bird of Hawaii and are endangered. I was incredibly excited to spot this bird and hopped out of the car with my 300mm, but to my surprise they came towards me instead of waddling away, so with this encounter I mostly managed some pretty head shots.

We spent over 3 hours in the park, wandering around grabbing shots, eating a picnic lunch in the car, and bird watching.  I'd hoped the large seabirds would float on the thermals closer to the viewpoint, however they seemed to favor the distant cliffs, only passing overhead once in a while.  The winds were moving fast so they were difficult to track with the zoom.

A - Brown Booby

Iwa - Great Frigatebird (on the left) and an A - Brown Booby (on the right)

Another A - Brown Booby

Family shot at the lighthouse.

We also spotted some whales way offshore, but they were too far for good shots.

On the way out of the refuge we spotted a small family of Nenes on the side of the road, I hopped out to get a few shots of their full bodies

The guardrail is a terrible backdrop, but look!  Baby Nene!

From here we continued on the highway to a farmer's market in Hanalei. We bought some fresh slices of pie and several fruits.

These are rambutan... you break them open and the inside is sort of like a sweet peeled grape, but with a giant seed in the center.

From here we drove over a few blocks to the beach side of the town and grabbed a parking spot on the beach. We'd brought bathing suits, however the wind and waves were to heavy for swimming, so we just enjoyed watching the weather move over the Na Pali coast in the distance. 

 G had some fun feeding the birds on the beach... it was so odd to me to see red-crested cardinals all over the beach, as I consider them a southern US bird.

As dinner time approached, we read through a few menus in Hanalei but opted to drive back down to the Dolphin. This time we took a table inside where I had more options from the full menu. I was both excited and impressed that this restaurant's philosophy is to simply grill the fish... no sauces with ingredients to worry about, just salt, pepper, and heat. I had a terrific piece of grilled uku.

It is an interesting firm, white fish. The best way I could describe it is this: let's say you are on the Enterprise and you tell the computer you want steak and lobster for dinner, but the computer messes up and blends the two types of meat instead of giving you a piece of beef and a piece of lobster. When dipped in butter, the flavor was like lobster, but the texture was like a medium piece of steak.

Day of shooting ends with a mai tai!  I think they called this drink the No Ki Oy.

D was happy with his sushi.

After dinner we headed back to the condo to clean up and prepare for the next day. I wanted to hit the canyon early in hopes of better weather, so I sorted out my camera gear and went straight to bed.