Hawaii Vaca, Post 27 - Day 10 Part 1 - Sunny Beach & Morning Drive

Our penultimate day on the islands is here and we're all feeling it. Usually around day 8 on any vacation, I'm starting to want to be home but here we are grabbing a bite to eat before we head out for the day and I think we're all trying to figure out ways to stay now, not just Robby...

It's not to be and we know it.

Our plan for the day:
1.)  Morning swim
2.)  Mountain drive (right by the cottages)
3.)  Lunch
4.)  Additional swimming
5.)  Luau

This beach was just a short drive from our cottage and we figured since it's near the end of the road, quite literally on the island, it wouldn't be very busy. It wasn't...  as you can tell.  It was us and one white 4x4 vehicle (whose tracks we're walking thru) and that was it!  As we got closer to the water, the waves got bigger and more violent, not too mention LOUD!  No dice, I ain't going in that and I'm not comfortable with family in those types of waves either.  What you can't tell from this picture is that the sand goes down a fairly good sized hill and quite a bit more distance to the water, and it was still very loud!

We left the building and decided to do the mountain drive (hwy 550) and hit a beach after that.  Here is one of the first spots we got out to take a couple of quick pics. Robby is pretty hot at this point that he didn't get to swim in the ocean again.

From that same spot looking mostly West.

Further on up the road...

I believe that smallish island on the horizon is Lehua, which is about a mile North of Ni'Hua which I mentioned in the previous post.

What really sucks about taking photographs of what you're doing at that place and time is that the pictures are always such a HUGE let down.  You cannot tell that if I fell from here, I probably wouldn't die, but I would tumble for 30 - 40 seconds before reaching the bottom.  The depth of what we were seeing is just simply lost.

I love a good shot of the road that you're following, especially when you're somewhere that is breath-taking beautiful!

If I didn't know that this was taken on Kauai, I would have just assumed that it was somewhere out in the Southwest.

Love the contrast of colors in this shot.

Wow!

That's Waimea down there.  Our cottage are well off to the right side of this photo.  To scale, probably a mile.  That water outlet is Poowaiomahaihai Ditch, or where the water drains off the mountians to the sea.

It's not a Nene sighting... it was just right there!

And back down to see level at Historic Waimea Driftwood beach.

We didn't do anything there, just took the picture because we liked it.

That took most of our morning so we went back to the cottage and the boys went swimming while mom and dad went back into town to get four entrees from 3 different restaurants to split.