5 Days in Kauai

Whew...it has been one crazy week. You know I kinda' look like that Yahoo emoticon, in which the little guy wipes off his sweat and sighs. Vacation nevers feels like one when it is spend somewhere away from home. You are constantly looking at the map, making sure every single attraction is not missed, and the pictures that were taken in a rush justify your "been-there-done-that" attitude. HappyOblivion and I were trying to avoid the whole ordeal of "touring Big Island in 3 days" (ha, that's another story to tell), so we decided to take it lazy and took a trip to our favorite island, Kauai, for the short amount of time we have off.

HappyOblivion's friend was very nice to accomodate us in his new house in Kalaheo. He also let us borrow his brand new Toyota FJ Cruiser to drive around the island and go on our crazy adventures. Little did we know we were going to spend a chunk of time playing Guitar Hero and saving Toad in Super Mario Galaxy than touring the island. One of our crazy adventures was driving in the sand dunes at Polihale State Park, our friend's idea of "breaking-in" the car. The road to the park was bumpy, muddy, and rainy. We splashed every puddle, big and small, along the way while praising the performance of the car. "This car is great!" we boast, or "This car can do anything!" Then...we got stuck in the sand dune, no kidding. HappyOblivion and his friend had to dig, in the heavy rain, away the sand surrounding the barried tire, which didn't work. Luckily some locals showed up and helped pull us out. Of course we had to pay him beer money to do so but 20 bucks wasn't at all an expensive lesson considering we had no way of getting out. Regardless of this unfortunate occurrence, we had a great time on the beach. The water was amazingly clear. I still remember the sparkles that filled the surface of the water, and would reappear after every wave.

Another highlight was our trip to the Kauai Nursery and Landscaping, and the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG). I had wanted to take pictures of rows and rows of seedlings, and bunches of the same plant. Home Depot and regular garden shops just don't have enough plants to achieve the desired effect. At the nursery, I took so many pictures I thought the camera was going to die on me. There were bunches of everything and I was going happy crazy! The next stop was NTBG. It wasn't the greatest botanical garden partly because I had to pay $20-40 to tour the upper parts of the garden. Despite this limitation, I did manage to take some good close-up photos of a butterfly pollinating a large orange flower. I waited 20 minutes in the midst of buzzing bees, scary spiders (those that weave X spiderwebs - I think these are poisonous), and hungry mosquitoes. The entire time I was waiting for the perfect moment, the hungry mosquitoes were feasting on HappyOblivion. Luckily I only got a couple bug bites :D Some of the photos I like from this trip are posted in my Flickr account or below.



Lately, I have been particularly interested in photography. With that said, I would like to start a tradition in which I pick a favorite photo for each collection I create. The winning photo from this trip is...tun tun tun...