More Adventures …. and More Rain!

Hi, everyone!

Saturday was Nancy-san’s birthday!  Moose-san and I thought her birthday lei was very pretty!  Nancy-san and Joe-san and Grandma and Grandpa went out to dinner to celebrate.  They went to a restaurant with a view of sunset, but it was so cloudy there was no sunset to see!There was more rain overnight, but we did get a break on Sunday morning to check out the beach.  The ginger blossoms looked really fresh after all the rain!  We saw a turtle and THREE monk seals!  Moose-san and I wished they had all been on the beach on Saturday so Chad-san could have seen them!

In the afternoon, we started to watch the Super Bowl football game on TV.  It was raining again!  It rained so hard that we lost cable service, so we couldn’t watch the end of the game!  We were pretty sure the Eagles won, because we could hear the Eagles fans at the sports bar across the lawn from our resort.  The rain clouds were just moving away at sunset!  It was too wet to walk down to the beach, so we watched from Grandma and Grandpa’s lanai.

Monday is the day for the Sunshine Market in Koloa.  There was a market, but no sunshine!  It started raining again just as the market opened at noon.  Moose-san and I stopped to visit with the market master.  He has a new dog who wanted to make friends with us!  Then we looked at the pretty flowers and vegetables.  Do you suppose anybody ever makes a bouquet of radishes and beets?

Grandpa checked weather radar.  The rain was coming in from the southwest and had already passed through Hanapepe, so we drove there for lunch.  We went to Japanese Grandma’s Cafe and had yummy tempura bento bowls.  I told the owner that I had an oba-chan (Japanese Grandma), too!  Moose-san and I had a chance to practice our chopstick skills!

The Swinging Bridge in Hanapepe is right next to the cafe,  so we stopped there after lunch.  Moose-san and I were very brave!  We went out on the bridge and looked at the big tree caught in the river.  There had been flash flood warnings for Hanapepe the day before!  Before we left Hanapepe, Grandpa went to Midnight Bear Bakery and got a loaf of rosemary sea salt baguette.  Moose-san and I made sure it got a safe ride!

Before we got back to the resort, we had a coconut adventure!  We stopped at the Thai lady’s produce stand for coconut water.  The Thai lady chopped a coconut open and put two straws in it so Moose-san and I could drink the coconut water.  When it was all gone, she chopped the coconut open and cut out the meat for us!  I made sure to thank her the way I learned in Thailand!

Since the rain had stopped, we all walked down to the beach to see who was there.  There were two monk seals, and the response team volunteer said they were young males who had been there before.  It’s hard to remember how excited we were four years ago when just one monk seal showed up on the beach for one day in the week!  We got to visit a nice sand castle on the beach, too.  It reminded Moose-san and me of building sand castles with Bill-kun and Karin-chan and James here four years ago.  On the way back to our unit, Moose-san wanted to look for aquatic weeds in the flood pond on the lawn.  He lost his balance and almost rolled into the water!  He got a little wet, so I sat with him on the lanai in the sunshine until he could dry off.

Our Monday adventures weren’t over!  After dinner, we all went to E Kanikapila Kakou, the Hawaiian music concert in Lihue.  My friend Auntie Fran isn’t making leis there any more, but there was a new lei maker instead.  The featured artist, Aldrine Guerrero, was a very good ukelele player and we enjoyed listening to him!  Moose-san and I made friends with the ukelele that was being raffled off at intermission.  Guess what?  Grandma and Grandpa’s names were called as winners of one of the CD door prizes!  Moose-san and I helped Grandma choose which CD to take.

At 3 a.m. on Tuesday, we got an emergency alert telephone call about flash flooding, because it was raining again!  It dried out a little by breakfast time.  Grandma had a doctor’s appointment and Wailua Falls wasn’t very far away from the doctor’s office.  So we all went along and visited the falls after her appointment.  Because of all the rain, the water was pouring over Wailua Falls!  Normally, there are two distinct streams of water, but on Tuesday they were flooding each other!  I had to hold on to Moose-san very tightly so he didn’t fall over the railing into the gorge!  We made friends with a pet pig, too!

Radar was again showing better weather to the west of us, so we all went to Waimea to eat lunch at Porky’s Cart.  Porky’s Cart is very famous on Kauai for good food.  We got there a little too early, so we went back to the beach at Kekaha to look at Niihau and surf.  Then we went back to Waimea and ordered at Porky’s Cart.  While we were waiting for our food to be ready, we visited the craft stands in the same field.  We made friends with a koa wood carved sea turtle.  Moose-san saw a reindeer cousin on the front of a truck!  Then we had a Porky’s #1.  That’s a pork and pineapple sausage with kalua pork and barbecue sauce on top, with sauted sweet onions on a toasted roll.  It was yummy!

We made two more stops on our way back to the resort.  First, we stopped at Salt Pond Beach, near Hanapepe, just because we had never been there before.  This is another nice beach that Bill and Karin and James and Thomas would like!  There is still an active salt pond at the park, but with all the rain it was flooded, too!  Then we went to the Kauai Cookie factory and had samples of their cookie flavors.  One of them is flavored with sake and furikake!  We thought Bill-kun would especially like that one!  Instead of animal crackers, Kauai Cookie makes rooster cookies!  Each cookie has an outline of a rooster in a different color and flavor of cookie dough in the middle of a round cookie!

It was sunny when we got back to the resort, so Joe-san decided to go snorkeling at the beach.  Grandma and Nancy-san and Moose-san and I went along.  There was one sea turtle and one monk seal on the beach, and they were napping together!  The monk seal didn’t seem to mind all the sand on his face!  While Joe-san was swimming, a very dark cloud passed over the beach.  It started raining again just as we got back to our unit!

Today it’s sunny, so far!  There’s still a chance of pop-up showers, but we’re going out on more adventures anyway.  Grandma says they’re having four to eight inches of snow back in Fairport and everything is shut down.  Being here instead is nice!

Love,

Lion-san