Kauai Day 1

Started to do this post and realized it would be ridiculously long. (no wonder it's taken me a few weeks to do this!) So I'm thinking I'll break it up into days we were there.

The Big Island from the plane...almost there!

The view from our room

Our first full day we went to the west side, aka the dry side. We drove to the top of Waimea Canyon to the Pu'u o Kila Lookout and were greeted with this view:

We knew there must be some sort of view beyond the clouds so we decided to hike a bit down the Pihea trail and see if the weather cleared.

The Pihea trail became the Alaka'i Swamp trail

We eventually turned around and started back up

And suddenly the clouds cleared for about 30 seconds

And revealed the Kalalau valley

From one of the Waimea Canyon lookouts we saw the forbidden Island of Ni'ihau, forbidden because only natives of Ni'ihau are allowed on the island

Hiked down the Canyon trail from one of the lookouts to get inside Waimea canyon

Waimea Canyon....looks a a lot like southern Utah. The previous picture is from a hike down into the canyon on the left.

On the way back from the west side, we stopped at Kauai Coffee, with 3100 acres of coffee beans