Stacey's first full day

The first full day Stacey was there was a busy one.

Stacey had been up since like five am thanks to jet-lag, and the Kauai roosters that like to hang out in the backyard of the crew house.

Cock-a-doodle-STFU!

Luckily she had been quiet so I could get some sleep (I crashed around four, woke up around eight-thirty). Stacey was going to see about getting a mani-pedi, but apparently those places aren't open at six-thirty, much to her dismay.

Once I was finally up we went out to get some Starbucks - after all, Hawaii is the only place you can get a coconut mocha frappuccino. After that it was off towards Poipu to check out Spouting Horn.

To get there, you pass through the famous tree tunnel, where the trees have grown very high, and create a canopy over the road for a few miles.

Just after turning onto the road to Poipu, the trees go for a ways.

Past the tree tunnel, a few turns, and a traffic circle, and we were at the Spouting Horn.

The spout.

Spouting Horn is the result of a shoreline lava tube. When the waves come in just right it pushes a spout of water out of the top, hence the name. I apologize for the lack of decent video, it was the only decent geyser I got, but I was zoomed in a little too far.

While walking around the few shops and such at the Spouting Horn site, Stacey totally awwww-ed at a baby chick she saw and insisted on taking a picture.

Awwwwww.

I also saw a curious sign in the parking lot...

Seems like one would feed the other...

After cruising by a couple of beaches to get our bearings and such, we hit the Poipu Shopping Village. After window shopping and looking at random crap, it was time for lunch. Stacey had heard about a place a few years ago on The Travel Channel and suddenly saw the sign - Puka Dog.

Kinda hard to miss the sign.

Puka Dog takes a slightly different approach to the standard hot dog; first they use a non-standard bun. The bun used is basically a small loaf of bread with the center drilled out. Then they place it on their toasting rack.

Note the bun being toasted on the special toasting rack.

You then have a few choices to make regarding the hot dog (polish sausage or soy dog), lemon-garlic sauce (they have three levels of hot, only the hottest level is even slightly warm), and relish (they have a bunch of different relishes). The ones we got that day were pineapple and mango. The pineapple relish was as good as expected. The mango relish was surprisingly better than what I was expecting.

They even give you a little cup of passion-fruit-infused brown mustard.

After lunch I learned that another employee was coming into Lihue that evening, about three days sooner than I had expected. So, since I wasn't on official company business, I had to relinquish the car and secure a rental. While this did add a fair amount of unexpected expense to the trip, it also gave us the opportunity to get a vehicle that would allow us to not have to worry about things like ground clearance.

I dub thee "Adventuremobile."

With the rental process complete, we returned to the crew house and dropped off the crew car. We also made a few Jeep modifications, such as taking off the rear sides and rear window for maximum flow through. We thought about taking off the top as well, but we didn't want to have to worry too much about sudden rain storms, sunburns, or trying to put the damn thing back on (it's a bit of a pain to get it off as it is).

With the Jeep all ready to go, we headed to Waimea Canyon, on the east side. Waimea actually means canyon in Hawaiian, and I think every island has a Waimea area/town. To talk about the Waimea area on the Big Island, one would call it Kamuela, to distinguish this area from all the other Waimea areas on the other islands.

It was a pretty easy hike to the top of the lookout point, took maybe five minutes at the most. Once there we saw why the Kauaian Waimea Canyon is called the Grand Canyon of the Pacific.

From the lookout station, this is maybe a quarter of the visible canyon.

As is my usual with this kind of scene, I took a panorama, but the file is once again too large to post here. Besides, one of the pictures is tilted a little oddly, so you have to use your imagination just slightly to make the panorama work.

After Waimea Canyon, we wandered down the road and found a sign for the Russian Fort. We pulled in out of curiosity and were pleasantly surprised, but not by the fort.

The fort itself was made of lava rock, stacked high and contoured a couple hundred years ago. It mostly looks like a heap of overgrown, settled lava rock. The cool part about the fort is that a lot of the original foundations for the old buildings can still be found mostly intact. I didn't really get any good pictures, as the light was starting to fade, and there's only so much you can do with overgrown lava rock.

One of the information plaques showing the shape and location.

However, the coolest part of that stop was not the fort, but the black sand beach we found on the backside of it. We also found that this is where the Waimea river dumps into the ocean.

Waimea river right and center, Pacific ocean left.

What I was not expecting, having never been on a black sand beach, was that the sand was eerily like stepping on used coffee grounds; soft and yielding, with large grains.

After we retreated from the beach, we went to dinner back in Lihue, at Kauai Pasta. Not a big restaurant, it is nice, not too badly priced, and the food is awesome. Once dinner was over, it was time to head home and crash, as Stacey was feeling the jet lag, and I the lack of sleep.

And that was the end of Stacey's first full day.