have you been to Kauai?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. I was there in 1991

the year before Iniki.

I was attending a summer seminar for language teachers at the University of Hawaii, and they gave us a four-day weekend for the 4th of July, so my roommate and I took advantage of a special package deal for Kauai, including hotel, 48 hours of car rental, and roundtrip airfare.

We stayed in a Radisson resort on the eastern shore, which had an ocean front but no beach. On the first day we drove up to the Na Pali cliffs. The ocean there is really shallow, so we could wade quite far out to see them.

The next day, we headed south to a secluded beach that offered a view of the privately owned island of Niihau and then to Waimea, which gets only 25" of rain per year. Then we drove inland through sugar cane fields, evergreen forests, and into the real jungle-like area around Waimea Canyon. Just a few miles inland from Waimea, it gets over 300" of rain per year.

That road ends at the TOP of the Na Pali cliffs, so we got a view of the cliffs we had seen from the bottom the day before.

We had dinner at Poipu Beach.