Kaua'i - Days 1 & 2

Most of you know that Rob and I just returned from an amazing vacation to Kauai. Rob surprised me with the trip for our anniversary back in June and we've been counting down the days, minutes, and seconds until the trip finally came. We were so excited for a break from everything and it was EXACTLY what we needed. I'm going to post our vacation a couple of days at a time. Since I use our blog as my journal, I want to document our trip in detail. So, if you don't want to be bored with all the little details you can skim through and just look at the pictures.

Day 1

We left for beautiful Kauai last Sunday morning. The flight was extremely long for my liking, but we finally arrived in paradise.

On the plane, unable to contain our excitement anymore!

We picked up our rental car (a sweet Mustang convertible), and headed to our hotel. Our hotel was a quiet cozy little place on the East shore. We got checked in and did a little exploring.

On the beach in front of our hotel

Our sweet ride

We then headed to the Coconut Marketplace (which was conveniently located right next to our hotel) and picked up some Hawaiian BBQ. We decided to take it to go and ended up enjoying our meal on the beach. The food was AMAZING and reminded us of our favorite restaurant in Cedar City. After dinner we headed up to our room and hit the sack.

Day 2

So much for sleeping in...we woke up the next morning at 6:30 am! I was awakened by the lovely birds singing outside our room. We decided to get up and head out for the day. Our first stop...Wally World! That's right, they even have Walmarts in paradise. We decided to save a little money on food by buying some breakfast stuff at the store. I don't know how much money we really saved, because we spent $3.73 on a HALF gallon of milk! Yikes! After we dropped off the groceries back at our hotel, we decided to head over to the North Shore to check it out. Turns out...it was my favorite spot on the island!

Look at that scenery! I was in awe of the beautiful green peaks.

We researched some of the beaches on an amazing website, and decided on Hanalei Bay for our first beach stop. It was gorgeous! It wasn't crowded at all, which was quite surprising since it was Labor Day. We spent a couple of hours there relaxing, reading, and body surfing in the waves.

Hanalei Bay

This is overlooking the Hanalei Valley

After grabbing some lunch, we decided to do a little beach hopping. We headed over to Anini Beach, but shortly after scoping it out, we decided to head back to Hanalei Bay. Anini was extremely crowded, the sand wasn't smooth, the wind was blowing like crazy, and it wasn't great swimming conditions. So, we headed back to Hanalei and spent a couple more hours baking in the sun. We then headed west again and ended up at "the end of the road." On Kauai, there isn't a road that takes you all the way around the island. Kauai's famous Na Pali coast makes it impossible to get all the way around. You can only get to the Na Pali coast by air or water. Ke'e Beach is at the end of the road on the North side. We spent a short time there mainly scoping it out for the next day's activities. Again we were taken back by the amazing green mountain back drop.

Ke'e Beach

We had a long drive back to our hotel so after a short walk around Ke'e, we decided to call it a day and head back for some grub. We were kind of pathetic on the trip. We had a hard time adjusting to the time change, so we were in bed by 9pm every night and up at 6:30. It didn't really bother us though. Everything we wanted to do was during the day, and the sun went down before 7pm, so it was nice to get an early start every morning.