Honeymooning in Kauai
Trip Start
Jan 22, 2005
1
14
Trip End
Mar 25, 2012
Where I stayed
Westin Moana Surfrider, Waikiki
Poipu, Hawaii
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
If ever I go on a honeymoon, I'd relive this trip again!
When I arrived, we stayed at the Moana Surfrider. This hotel houses one of my top three favorite banyan trees! I'm sure a lot of people love this tree too. We have breakfast there, and I realize that the prices rival that of NYC hotel! My old love gave me a birthday gift: a couple of days in Kauai. No work. No phone calls. No distractions. Just us and nature. I was touched... it's hard to tear him away from work.
He rented a two bedroom house in Poipu, and I was the navigator (because he is, without a doubt, the worse with directions). The first thing I remember noticing was the small airport, and everything being pretty deserted. I was loving it already! It took a little while to figure out how to get to the car rental since everything looked closed, but we soon get on the rental shuttle bus and make our way to the house an hour later. The house is not ocean front, but sits on a hill that allows us to view the ocean. When you walk in, you see the living room, dining room & kitchen, and Japanese style screen doors leading into the master bedroom. It looked so comfortable! I was happy.
At night when we are in bed, all you hear is the wind screeching outside the house, and the rustling of the palm trees. Tell you the truth, I'd probably get a little freaked out if I was there alone that first night. The master bath has a cool feature: the oversized walk-in shower has shower heads on opposing sides of the walls, allowing you to be hit simultaneously with two sprays of water (left and right), or for two people to shower together yet separately. The third side of the wall is really not a wall, but a floor to ceiling piece of frosted glass (while the forth side is wall-less as it's the side where you enter). So it's this third wall of glass that freaks me out - the shadows from the trees outside make me imagine freaky things!
The next day, we wake at the crack of dawn and go meet the Hanalei canoe club for practice. He had this arranged in advance. We got in a little fight on the way out (about directions and I vaguely remember something about him having a bad dream) and were in that awkward stage of trying to let things be when we arrived in Hanalei Park. The outrigger team were standing about by their cars. They are a group of happy, friendly, and slightly kooky gringos who took us in like long lost family. They have one rule: couples cannot paddle in the same boat. Sure enough, husbands and wives are separated and like it that way! So the old love and I go into separate boats and we paddle out. The weather was rolling in, so we could not paddle out to see the Na Pali coast from the ocean side. Instead, we paddle in Hanalei River, which is an estuary! I had a lot of fun, and enjoyed being in different boats from my old love - this gave us a chance to see the enjoyment on each other's faces! I was in heaven! Later that day, we stop by a restaurant to eat and head back out to a beach near where we paddled. The weather started to roll in and the wind picked up. We were sitting on the beach when suddenly... splat. Splat. Splat, splat, splat... it was raining! If you looked a couple of hundred yards away, it was still sunny and dry. Oh well, we took the towels we were sitting on and draped it over our heads and continued to sit there. Funny how the two of us could just do that without a word... until we look at each other and bust out laughing at the irony of it all. Finally, when it was clear the rain wasn't going away, we got up and went back south to Poipu. Along the way, we stopped by Princeville to use the bathroom, so we snuck into the golf course. While there, I told him I wanted to go for a quick run, so I got my running clothes out of the trunk, changed into it, filled up my water belt, and left him wandering around on the golf course. He doesn't run anymore, but he won't stop me from doing it when I can. It was a VERY hilly run, but I needed to get some of this happiness out of my body or else I might burst! Nicely tired, I head back, sneak back into the women's locker at the golf course (it's a private members-only course... but we're in Hawaii, land of aloha!), rinse and change, then we head to town for dinner.
The following day we wake up in the morning and go scuba diving... the photos speak for itself.
Next day, a hike through the mountains leave us shivering from the cold - I had to wear the coat I brought from New York!
This was the most beautiful trip I've ever had - physically and spritually (nature is spritual to me) - and just because the old love and I are no longer lovers, it doesn't mean it wasn't good while it lasted... perhaps it didn't work out because it was too good to be true. I wish we were still friends so that I can tell him how much I appreciate all we've shared... but unfortunately we just can't be friends after having the kind of relationship we had, so these journal entries/blogs will be my final tribute to this relationship. Kauai was our last trip to Hawaii together after eight years of ups and downs. The downs were bad and caused us to hit rock bottom... it turns out that we bring out the best and the very worst in each other. Isn't it ironic?
