Our second morning at the Kauai Inn started after sunrise, which gave us a chance to see how beautiful the grounds and background was.
As we left to go out for the day we found a new city have moved in down the street.
To quote a line from the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ – “I’m bettin’ he’s gonna swerve first”
Our day had us headed to some waterfalls – first was Wailua Falls. I was expecting to drive into a park and go for a hike to the falls, but we ended up driving up and getting a glimpse of them from the overlook in the fog.
Still the double falls was impressive.
We then headed to the nearby Opaeka’a Falls. While more distance, you did get a better view – but still no hiking.
The Wailua River Valley is historically a Native Hawaiian settlement area.
We continued up the road as far as it could go until we got to the Keahua Arboretum.
Not a traditional arboretum, but more of a ‘woods’, it nonetheless has some amazing trees. These are known as Rainbow Eucalyptus trees.
As Wikipedia states: “The unique multi-hued bark is the most distinctive feature of the tree. Patches of outer bark are shed annually at different times, showing a bright green inner bark. This then darkens and matures to give blue, purple, orange and then maroon tones. The previous season’s bark peels off in strips to reveal a brightly colored new bark below. The peeling process results in vertical streaks of red, orange, green, blue, and gray.”
Easily some of the coolest trees I have ever seen.
With that we headed back down the mountain, passing some houses with great views.
We stopped by Poliahu Park.
Where the remains of a Heiau (temple) remains from ancient Hawaiian times. People have left lei’s as an offering.
Our plans were to continue north to a wildlife preserve and lighthouse when we ran into a bit of a problem – literally. An elderly man missed seeing us coming down the road and pulled directly in front of us – BAM.
Airbags are an exciting event – scared the #$%^ out of me.
Fortunately nobody was seriously hurt, and after getting a replacement car from Avis (who get’s a shout out about how well they handled this situation), we got checked out and were on our way.
We decided to skip the lighthouse and instead went to the Spouting Horn Park, where we met some of the local sea birds.
Spouting Horn was nice, but with the much smaller waves it wasn’t nearly as impressive as the ones in Maui.
With that our eventful day came to an end.
RDZ Photography 