2nd Day in Kauai

Monday, june 16th, I woke-up in Kauai lazily and walked to the Lanai and saw that it was pouring down buckets of rain. Bad, very, very bad. I live in Portland I can handle rain but we had left the top down on the Jeep.

So we rushed out and tried to put the top up, but it was wet and slippery and we had no idea what we were doing. Finally, we got the top up then we proceeded to spend 45 minutes mopping up the 3 inches of rain in the bottom of the jeep with our beach towels. We would soak a towel then ring it out and soak up more.
The picture on the left is what I looked like when it was all over, cuddling a nice dry towel.

Then we drove to Wiamea Canyon and explored the western side of Kauai. If I was disappointed with the level of green-ness before I was devastated at the west side of the island. There is a lot of Brown and red and a little bit of green.


This is a picture of Fort Elisabeth, the ruins of a Russian Fort built in 1816. We found this while looking for a letterbox. I found it so foreign looking, almost how I picture Australia.

We found a little local place to buy lunch. It was very shady looking but we got a box lunch. It had 2 tiny but delicious pieces of fried chicken, fried ham, teryaki beef, little Vienna Sausages, a hash cake and the ubiquitously Hawaiian scoop of rice. I was beginning to wonder where all the fruity goodness I had imagined Hawaiian food to be was. It was all very good (except the hash cake.) Here is a picture of Nicki enjoying it.
There are 2 very distinguishing characteristics about Kauai and one of them is the red dirt. the dirt is everywhere and impossible to get out of your clothes. I have stained socks and shoes from hiking. As were were driving up the canyon we saw this neat stream running through the dirt.

Nicki at the overlook for Wiamea Canyon.

And Nicki looking down the Kalalau Valley. There are 2 ways to get into that valley by boat and 2 days of Hiking. we took a short hike along the ridge line but we forgot to take pictures of the very interesting terrain.
After the Canyon we drove to the end of the road on the west side where we were met with signs like these. The military has a lot of land in Hawaii. We found out later that if we had only driven a little further we would have been at one of the most isolated beaches in Hawaii.
On the way back we stopped to look for another letterbox at Glass Beach. The letterbox was in a fascinating cemetery, it was so interesting that we forgot to go look at the actual beach of glass.
I will do a whole post on the cemetery because it was so neat, but first a word about chickens....