Travel Blog ~ Kauai Vacation: Part 1 ~ Days 1-3

Seriously. BEST. VACATION. EVER! Someone pinch me because I woke up in a dream. That's how I felt everyday while we were in Kauai. It was magical, breathtaking, beautiful, perfect and all those other lovey, mushy words. We were definitely in paradise! 

Day 1: We arrived Saturday October 24th around 11:30am Hawaii time. 

So after being up and traveling about 10 hours we still had almost a whole day to spend on the island. We rented our car, picked up our snorkel gear and beach chairs, took some pictures, got groceries, ate lunch, and then checked into our condo. Oceanfront, bottom floor, we were able to just walk our out sliding door onto the grass and then the beach. 

We dipped our feet into the warm water and breathed in that sultry salty air, ahh! Then to be perfectly honest, we cut up a fresh pineapple, devoured it and then we crashed and went to bed at 7pm! Now before you laugh that's 11pm MST and we had been up since 4am traveling, so we were pooped!

Sunday Day 2: We woke up bright and early...NOT, well the early part was right, 2:30am! But the bright part, not so much, the sun does not even come up for 4 more hours at 6:30. So we waited around, showered, finished unpacking and ate breakfast. By then we were able to see the first bit of light breaking over that endless horizon. This was the most beautiful sunrise ever. The clouds looked like cotton candy and were every color imaginable, yellow, pink, turquoise, green & orange, gorgeous just gorgeous!

 We had second breakfast lol, packed our lunch, and headed to the north side of the island to spend the day and do some sightseeing. We ended up finding a nice spot with shade for Alan, red hair, freckles and sun don't mix, even with SPF 70. There was of course plenty of sun for me to enjoy!

This is Tunnel's Beach in Hanalei, my favorite spot in the world! And do you see that, we pretty much had it to ourselves. Yet another reason Kauai is my favorite!

We checked out Hanalei Pier

 We stopped at the lookout for Hanalei's Taro fields

 Then back in Kapaa, we got the most amazing shave ice EVER! Japanese -style hand shaved, organic fruit, yumm-o! Alan got blackberry and I had strawberry. They were delicious!

Then to end the day we stopped at Kealia Beach and watched the locals surf. There was a big swell on the east and north sides of the island and there were surfers everywhere! We got back to the hotel, ate dinner and we were in bed at 8:30pm lol! 

 Monday Day 3: We woke up early again, 4:30am, but were getting better at this island life :) We had another pretty sunrise!

 We booked a catamaran sunset dinner cruise on the Na Pali Coast. The Na Pali coast is only accessible by boat or helicopter. The huge sea cliffs make it impossible to be able to drive and see it. So we may have or may have not had to turn around and drive 2 extra hours because someone forgot their camera and realized it after they have gotten to the port after an hours drive :/ Thank goodness we left ridiculously early so we could sight see. We made it back in plenty of time and didn't miss our boat, we even had time to stop and snap a picture of the canyon on the way to Port Allen :) 

Beautiful rainbow against the southwest side of the cliffs

But unfortunately we only made it halfway through our tour when we lost an engine. But Captain Andy's is an amazing sailing company and they still gave us an amazing tour, served us dinner, entertained us, gave us free drinks, stopped in a pod of dolphins so we could watch them jump all around the boat, and then to top it all off they refunded us our money for the trip. So even though we didn't make it to see all of the Na Pali coast we had an amazing, fun, free time!

We drove home in torrential rain, the only time we got rained on the entire time we were there. We got home and showered, because you will absolutely most definitely get soaked when you're on a catamaran tour lol! And I think we were able to muster up enough energy to stay up till 9pm lol!

Read the next part of our vacation here, days 4-5 & days 6-8.