Waimea Hotels
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And We're Off!
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The flight to Kauai went nice and smooth. Not glitches whatsoever. This was the first time I flew on an airline where you had to pay to eat and all they offered were sandwiches. We ate snack we brought with us instead.
We got into Kauai around 5:00 PM, picked up our rental car and then headed for a grocery store. We stay our first three nights in a little cabin with a kitchen up in the mountains of Koke'e. There is a restaurant there, but it is only open between 9:00AM - 4:00PM. We planned on hiking while we are up there, so we wanted to bring food with us so we wouldn't be limited in how long we could stay out.
We stopped at a Big Save grocery store in Lihue and found stuff for dinners and some fruit for breakfast and hiking, but no baked goods that looked like something we wanted to eat and nothing really for lunch.
We drove down the main highway heading to Koke'e hoping we would find the rest of what we needed in another town. We saw a little super mart on the highway near a little town called Lawa'i and decided to stop there. Sometimes you can find Hawaiian style Japanese bento boxes in little super marts and convenience stores that work perfect for a packed lunch. Bento boxes usually have rice with a choice of different items to eat with the rice such as some kind of meat, some Japanese pickles and some kind of fish. We didn't find any bento boxes at the super mart, but we discovered a little restaurant next to the super mart called Mark's Place that had some home made fruit turnovers that we bought for breakfasts, and we had teriyaki chicken for dinner. It was very good, nice and tender and cheap.
We stopped at Ishihara's grocery in Waimea that we had been to before on a previous trip to Kauai. We knew it often had bento boxes and we were glad to find that they did. They were typical for Hawaii, rice with a Japanese meatball, a slice of spam, a slice of two different types of sausages, I think one of them was Portuguese sausage, oshinko (Japanese pickle), and kamaboko (Japanese fish cake). They come wrapped up in a little package, including chop sticks and are easy to take on a hike. These bento boxes are very popular with Hawaiians and we've learned to get past the idea of eating spam on occasion because they are so convenient and cheap.
Once we got all our supplies, we headed up the winding road to Koke'e. While we were driving up the road, we saw two owls. Occording to my bird book of Kauai, there are only two species of owl on the island, the introduced barn owl and the Hawaiian owl. I'm pretty sure at least one of them was the Hawaiian owl, but I'm not sure of the other one. That was the first time had had seen an owl in Hawaii though.
We found our key with insturctions on which cabin was ours, in a drop box waiting for us at the lodge. They also close at 4:00PM. It took us two tries before we found our cabin, but we finally figured out which one was ours. By this time is was getting pretty late and Dave was getting kind of cranky. Our rental car was really new a Crysler Sebring. It still smelled of new car and Dave was having problems figuring out how to use the remote for the locks and it didn't help that it was dark. He was trying to open up the trunk and every time he hit the button he thought was to open the trunk, the alarm would go off. He turned on the alarm three or four times before he finally figured out he was hitting the panic button on the remote (I didn't even know they had a panic button on those things.) Needless to say, this didn't help his mood any. So we start hauling all our gear out of the car and carrying it into the cabin. I noticed that mosquitoes were getting into the cabin so as I was leaving the cabin for another load, I pulled on the door intending to close it just enough to keep the mosquitoes out, when I heard it slam shut. I quickly turned back to try to stop it because as I heard it slam I pictured the key to the cabin sitting on the kitchen counter. Of course, the door was locked and the key inside.
All I could say was, "Oh no, Dave. Oh no, Dave."
"You locked us out, didn't you?" said Dave.
I cringed. "I'm sorry, but yes, I did."
For some reason, this actually put Dave in a better mood. I think it makes him feel good when I screw up and he gets an opportunity to fix things. I tell him that's because it happens so seldom. He went to the nearest window, pulled off the screen and the window slid open with no problem. What a relief! I was picturing us sleeping in the back of the car that night. I would have been in the dog house the rest of the trip, I think, if that had happened.
The cabin was bigger than the one we had the last time we stayed here. It was a panabode log cabin big enough to sleep six, four single beds and one queen, one bath, full kitchen and a wood burning stove in the livingroom. That's because it gets pretty cold here at night and in the morning. All the mattresses were hard and mattress of the queen bed was concave even before anyone got into it. So we knew it was going to be bad, but we decided to sleep in it anyway so we could stay warmer. Needless to say, I slept on a slippery slope that night. I was dog tired though, so I managed to sleep through the night.
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