William Broadhead

Today we went to Hanalei, had some walnut shrimp, fried noodles, shave ice, and then went to Tunnels beach. Great snorkeling! I’ll put this place up and maybe beyond Shark’s Cove on Oahu. A pretty large circular reef with lots of fish that swarm you if you give them a little food. The outer edge of the reef drops off preciptously and looks like it would be great for scuba, but is good for snorkeling too if it is a bright and sunny day.  Huge Humuhumu’s!

Scotty Dog’s (Scotty’s) in Ka’a overlooking the beach. Had a Pork and Cabbage sandwich with fries and a Mahi fish sandwich with fries. A smidgen spendy ($12 or so each), but quite tasty and a great view.

Beaches, Noodles,

Got up late again, drove through Knutsen Gap, the Tunnel of Trees, through Kasdfds??, to Puipu and took a Waiolai Marriott Resort Presentation of about 120 minutes which landed us about $125 in Mahalo dollars which actually goes pretty far on Kuauai. We tried the southern beaches, pretty good snorkeling but a bit rough. I saw a giant sea turtle at all of 6 inches away from me. We sort of freaked each other out and both swam away as fast as we could. The turtle won the speed race by a large margin. They can MOVE! Checked out the Grand Hyatt (quite nice),
We drove up to Kintaro in Ka’a and had fabulous sushi for about $9 + tip after applying only 1 $25 certificate!

8:30am Helicopter ride with NO DOORS! It was AWESOME. We left from Port Allen and went up Waimea Canyon, then across/through the Na Pali coast, then across most of the island.

We then grabbed a quick breakfast at Restaurant “M” and then drove to the top of Waimea Canyon stopping at every view point possible, pretty much.

We briefly overlooked the so-called Russian Fort which is pretty much a horrible job of putting up about 1.5 feet of poorly lain rock walls, more like rock piles. The story of the maniac behind it all is pretty interesting though.

This night we got some meals at a BBQ place on….. It was okay, in particular the Kalua Pork & Cabbage and Kalby beef (not coby). But maybe not incredible.

We got up late, a good 12hrs sleep.

Made the usual trips to Costco, local stores and WalMart to get ‘supplies’ and food we had forgotten or did not want to bring. We got some salad and accouterments, boogie boards, sunblock, milk ($5 at Costco, was $8.99 at local Star Market!), chips, mango-peach salsa, Slack Key Hawaiian CD, etc.

Back to the room.

Owner’s reception was at 5. It was not that eventful, but they had food and drink and some entertainment and the night was lovely. We noticed we were well under average age for Marriott timeshare owners, but hey… enjoy it now, right? By 8:30 we went back to the room and pretty much crashed with a little TV. Jet lag still made it feel quite late.

Noonish Delta flight SLC to HNL Honolulu. Went right over to Go! Airlines on a CRJ200 to Lihue. We picked up our rental car, an Impala with leather and sunroof for the low low price of about 220/wk from Budget. We made it just in time to check-in at the Lihue Marriott Vacation Club at 6:59pm. They were packing up but were very gracious and made us feel very welcome.

We got to our rooms and it was a great view in the Kilohana tower on the 8th floor. The Lihue Marriott is Marriott’s first Hawaiian property I was told and was purchased and repurposed so the rooms are not quite like a typical Marriott let alone a Marriot Vacation Club. But they are not bad, quite nice really. We had the 2 room dealy which was plenty big, so 2 bathrooms, a Murphy bed hidden away in an armoire, a big TV with DVD player, a galley kitchenette with sink, dishwasher, microwave and 36″ fridge. No stove or oven though. The other room had king bed, armoire with TV and cube fridge and the usual desks, tables, chairs, etc.

Our balconies overlooked the bay there and the crashing waves were just the right decibel level to make you know you were on vacation. We almost immediately crashed after traveling all day.