West and East Side Adventures!

Hi, everyone!

My bedroom here is decorated with pictures of Japanese children playing!  How did anybody know that would be perfect decorations for a little Lion-san?

Last Thursday, I visited three sea turtle friends and one monk seal on the beach.  We’re still having strong winds every day!   There’s so much surf that it’s hard to watch for whales.  I guess I’ll focus on watching surf, instead!

At lunch time we went to Dim ‘N’ Den Sum and got kalua fries!  That’s sort of the Hawaiian version of poutine.  The French fries are topped with kalua pulled pork and barbeque sauce.  They were yummy!

Before we picked up our lunch, Grandma got a mailing box at the post office.  I helped her pack up surprises for Bill and Karin, then we took the box back to the post office to mail! After that we went on a search for passion fruit syrup and goat cheese.  We found the passion fruit syrup at the Japanese grocery in Koloa, but the only nearby goat cheese was already flavored with garlic.  We had to drive east to Lihue and finally found plain goat cheese at the fourth store we tried!  When we got back, Grandma made a batch of passion fruit goat cheese and we had it for an afternoon snack with Midnight Bear bread.

It stayed cloudy at sunset, so we watched from our unit instead of going to the beach.

Friday morning we had a pretty sunrise!  I had a surprise when I went to the beach to visit my friends!  A team from NOAA had just finished putting identifying numbers on the shells of the two sea turtles on the beach.  That’s part of Honu Count 2023.  Honu is the Hawaiian word for sea turtle.  Anybody who spots a numbered turtle is asked to take a picture and send the time and location to NOAA.  Of course, NOAA knew where those turtles were today!  There were no monk seals on the beach.  We had a yummy mahi mahi plate from Dim ‘N’ Den Sum for lunch.  When I went back to the beach after lunch, there was another sea turtle on the beach.  I don’t know whether that turtle was disappointed to miss getting a shell number!

We had another cloudy sunset, then we got dinner from Savage Shrimp.

On Saturday morning Grandpa checked radar and there was no rain anywhere over Kauai!  There weren’t any clouds to the west of us at all!  Of course, we drove west to Waimea and Koke’e State Parks right after breakfast!  We got all the way to the end of the bumpy and winding road to the Kalalau Valley lookouts just as the first clouds were drifting into the valley.  There was a lot of mud at the farthest overlook, so we stayed on the paved platform.

We were all really happy to have a good weather day to see Kalalau, even if it was windy and chilly at the overlooks.  On the way back, we stopped at the Waimea Canyon overlooks, too.  Waipo’o Falls was pretty!  Last year, there was no water in the falls at all when we visited.

We stopped in Waimea town at Aunty Lilikoi’s to order passion fruit products mailed home for us and Joe-san and Nancy-san.  I was happy they had everything we wanted in stock!  We stopped again in Hanapepe to have lunch at Midnight Bear Bakery.  They were almost sold out of bread, but we got the next to last baguette and the last nutella cruffin!  I got to tell Ursa-san how much I like her bread.  Our grilled cheese sandwiches with pesto were yummy!

It was afternoon before I got to the beach to visit my friends, but they were still there!  I made four sea turtle friends and three monk seals friends!

Even though the radar didn’t show any rain around Kauai in the morning, we had a heavy pop-up shower Saturday afternoon.  The weather did clear for sunset.  It was a pretty one!

Sunday morning the sea turtles were so spread out on the beach that they needed four  separate “keep away” zones.  There weren’t any monk seals on the beach, so I made friends with the monk seal volunteers, instead!

Sunday night the sun actually set into the sea at the horizon instead of into a cloud bank.  Grandpa said he saw a green flash when it did!  Monday morning, the clouds were back!

I saw a rainbow on the way to the beach on Monday morning!  It was so windy when I got there that a hen was holding on to her chicks to keep them from blowing away!

There was a tree crew pruning the palms on the beach!  They were taking off fronds and coconuts before they could fall on anybody.  The tree crew climbed some of the trees, and there was a person in a bucket truck working on the tallest and skinniest ones!  I think they were very brave to be working on a windy day! They had a chipper like the one our tree crew in Fairport uses.

All the pruning activity didn’t seem to bother my sea turtle friends, who weren’t as spread out as they had been on Sunday.  For the second day in a row, none of my monk seal friends showed up!  I watched for surf, instead of whales, and saw some nice waves!  Then I made a new hibiscus friend.

Monday night, we went east of Lihue to attend E Kanikapila Kakou, the Hawaiian music festival.  This year, the Arts Council was selling tickets in advance!  The first half of this show was a lecture by Kilin Reece about Hawaiian stringed instruments, and how they developed into the steel guitar.  Then Bobby Ingano and his trio played.  Bobby-san is a VERY good steel guitar player!  The instrument he plays was the first model of electric steel guitar, called a frying pan steel guitar. I liked watching how he played the strings to make pretty and unusual sounds!

The concert was a family affair, because Bobby-san’s niece and the grand-daughter of his first guitar teacher came on stage to sing and play two numbers.    The instrument raffle at intermission included two steel guitars made of mango wood.  Bobby-san founded a group to teach disadvantaged youth how to make them.  The two people who won them were very excited to have them!

Love,

Lion-san

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *