Liralen's Adventures Through Life

We started the day by going out for breakfast. John had been making our breakfast most mornings, and he'd discovered a little cafe that was only open for breakfast and lunch in the second story of one of the buildings in our little town, and they had some intriguing specials.  So we woke up and walked over to the Olympic Cafe. We shared an omelet with Luau Pork, cheese, potatoes, and topped with a tomatillo sauce. It was served with home fries, and it was well worth getting. Most of the daily specials menu was what we'd been cooking for ourselves and eating all our fruit for probably a tenth the price of the restaurant food.  But the luau pork was super tender, the omelet itself was beautifully made, the eggs were tender and perfectly cooked. The melted cheese added richness, and the tomatillo salsa was tart and lovely. The home fries were good and garlicky, but I wished they'd crisped them better. Still... it was good, and the waitress was generous with the coffee.  The ...

First, Bali Hai. It was a picture I couldn't find yesterday.  Friday was mostly a recovery day. After breakfast we went on a walk. Then we headed back to the complex, and I went and worked out in the gym. I have hip and lower back things now that really respond well to me doing strengthening work. John went and got us more poke for lunch and we spent lunch on a Zoom meeting with Jet. He was on campus and talked with us via his phone until he ran out of charge and ran off to his board game evening get together.  We went on another walk and scouted out bakeries, coffee shops, and found another place that actually sold Kaua'i grown, medium roast coffee. The darker the roast for coffee, the more the roast profile takes over the taste of the whole cup. If you want to enjoy the varietal, then you really want at worst a medium roast that doesn't go too far into the second crack. Yes. We roast our own coffee for Reasons, which include knowing what varietal I have and where I want t...

Thursday, the 7th was a plan to get to see the Kilauea Lighthouse and wildlife sanctuary and to go and walk the Limahuli Botanical Gardens. Both required reservations and some exact timing with those reservations. The Kilauea reservations were done on the half hour, and you were expected to take no more than forty five minutes on the site, and that was stated on the ticket and website. The gardens suggested that one plan for at least an hour and a half on the grounds, and Google maps said that getting there could take everywhere from an hour and a half to forty minutes, depending on the construction that was along the way.  So our plans got a bit more extensive to make sure everything worked. Our Lighthouse reservation was for 10:30 and our Garden reservation was for 2:00 to give us plenty of time to have lunch and get where we needed to go. We also made a lot of possible plans for how to fill that time if the travel conditions were good, given what we'd seen on the scouting trip, ...

 On Wednesday we walked. Right after breakfast, we put on our walking shoes and headed north on the trail. There's a trail right behind the complex we're living in, and it goes fourish miles in either direction, along the coastline, so it accesses a lot of different beaches. I didn't want to go for more than half an hour, as we'd have to make our way back. John had a meeting around lunch time, so we weren't going to go too far this morning anyway.  It was fun to just walk and discover what we could see. The structure of Kaua'i, as an island, is fascinating, as it's the oldest of the Hawaiian islands. It rains constantly at the top of the mountain, and there are countless streams that come down off the top of the mountain. A lot of those streams ate into the rock and made valleys, breaking down the stones into earth, and the plants break down to make it all fertile. So much green. But everywhere there are rivers that just cut right down to the sea, and nearly...

I was just going to keep going, but we got really knocked off our emotional feet on November 5th, and not for just the reasons a lot of folks did. We actually didn't pay any attention to the Election Day news until late in the evening, and in Hawaii, late is really late for the rest of the country. 7pm in Hawaii is already tomorrow in New York.  What kind of knocked us off was that we found out that a dear friend of ours had died on Halloween, and his husband posted on Facebook about it on the 5th, and we were in shock.  We still did what we'd planned to do, i.e. scout out the southern side of the island, but it was with the constant distraction of remembering and thinking through stuff, and in the middle of our morning getting called to help with the memorial service. Luckily it's two days after we get back, so we can. We will. It just... felt so unreal, as we'd had no indicator, and as his husband said, "He was supposed to buy my mother with me, not this..."...

Planning... So today was the day we decided to scout the whole of the North Shore, just heading north from our base and going as far as it was possible to go. Kaua'i is like most of the islands here, i.e. an island with a road around it, and a few roads that go up to the top of the mountain in the middle of the island. The road around this particular island, though, isn't a closed ring. The shaping and wear on the mountains to the north cut deep valleys between ridges, and the roads get less and less possible to make the more they try to cross the deep cut valleys from the wear of the water that falls constantly on the top of the mountain.  Both Kaua'i and Hawai'i are shaped that way. Not so much Maui or some of the other islands.  But that means that there is an End of the Road going either way along the ring around Kaua'i. And to day we went North.  After a solid breakfast of an egg, a couple slices of sausage, a single slice of toast, two spoonfuls of plain yogur...