Stacy and I, after getting back from the conference trip in Boise in August, still had a lot to do and not much time!
We had been planning a trip, a kind of family reunion for our little family, and used the combination of events like my birthday, new grand baby Justine's 1 year birthday, our wedding anniversary, our son Sean's wedding anniversary, and an early birthday present for him by all of us, Sandy and family, Laura and family and me and Stacy all getting together in Hawaii where Sean lives and loves living!
At least that was the original plan.
Then, as things like this must be, arrangements had to start early and when started early things change! We wanted to make the trip more towards October at first and closer to Sean's birthday as it was going to be his 30th, but Sean, who is going to night school as well as working full time, decided he wanted to have the trip during his break from school and just take two weeks off from work too. So it was moved up to mid September. In doing that move then Laura couldn't get the time off so she and her family were out.
Sandy's husband was too busy to be there as he's working on the team to get Netflix's streaming service ready to work on the two new game consoles coming out at Christmas so he was out too.
So then it's down to us with Sandy and Justine meeting in Hawaii with Sean and Brandy and spending time together. So it gets all set, Stacy and I will fly out from Spokane, Sandy and Justine will fly out from San Francisco three days after we get there.
This trip became a first and quite an adventure in that Stacy and I had decided that we should try a house rental for our time there. Then we decided that instead of Oahu, we should all meet up and travel to a nearby island, and Stacy decided on Kauai, the garden island, since none of us had ever been to that island yet. Our last trip to see Sean in 2011 we'd spent 4 days on the big island of Hawaii. This trip would be 6 days on Kauai.
Everything gets set and it works! Stacy and I stay with Sean and Brandy in their apartment (no air conditioning!!!) Sandy and Justine fly out on Monday the 16th and we all pack up and meet her at the airport where we all get on the inter island flight to Kauai.
Stacy and I had never before done a vacation house rental so we didn't really know what to expect. Stacy spent days combing through adds and listings trying to find a "perfect" place, that actually had a vacancy the week we wanted. Not very easy if you wanted to be frugal!
But the place Stacy and I agreed on turned out to be........well, interesting!
Steelgrass Farm had a house from the late 70s or 80s located at an 8 acre working Chocolate Tree Farm in the area of east Kauai called Kapaa. Steelgrass is the area term for Bamboo which in the tropical climate, can grow as much as 12 inches a day! The house itself was open and airy, very nice because it also had no air conditioning! 3 bedrooms and 1 and a half bathrooms but one bedroom and the half bath separate and downstairs from the main part of the house. The main section of the house was a large open floor plan with a very large glass dining table, large kitchen area and living room area all in the one large high ceiling room with the 2 bedrooms and full bath off to one side of the overall house. The house was decorated in a very eclectic artist style with some very unique and some very disturbing artwork all over the main room. The artwork that creeped out Sean was the large paintings of what looked like 1960s era advertising artwork, bright colors but with the people in the artwork having two mouths each, one atop the other. To me the creepiest one was the full sized cast mold of a girls leg toped by her hands in an open flower petal like pose around her face mold. This was extremely well cast and was creepy in the fact that it was so lifelike it looked as if the girls face could open her eyes say something and you'd have a heart attack and die from fright!
There were also other full size human casts of a naked male body, yes naked, and pregnant woman, still naked too, but these were up high and not quite as noticeable as the head described above or the female arm and partial face on a coffee table.
There was a large old 80s era cathode tube TV that didn't get any channels but an extensive 80s era collection of VHS tapes, some DVDs, a large collection of vinyl records and books. But we didn't watch any videos while we were there. Pretty much every night we all sat on the deck, Sean played his guitar that he'd brought, watch the clouds fly by, sweat, get rained on a couple of times, bitten by mosquitoes, well Sandy was anyway, and reminisce about life!
The island of Kauai has only about 65 miles of coastland road and not even a road that goes completely around the island. Every day we all spent seeing many beautiful sites on the island, and we still only saw a small portion of what there was to see. And on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays they have a tour of the trees at Steelgrass and since we were staying there we could take a tour for free (relatively!). The tours are about 3 hours long and includes tasting of many varieties of local fruit that grows on the farm as well as samples of the various types of Chocolate and exactly how Chocolate goes from pod to confection and not only at their farm. We felt that it was very interesting to taste the differences of the Chocolates from various parts of the world. After that tour and lunch we went to a nearby Farmers Market that had been mentioned during the Chocolate Tour. Amazing is how I'd describe the variety of fruits that grow almost all the time on the Island since like Sean's island of Oahu, seasons are pretty much only seen on TV shows as it is perpetually summer so close to the equator.
The time never changes on the islands either and sun rise and sun set don't vary by much either. Almost always mid 80s in the daytime and low to mid 70s at night, for ever!
Places we visited were the largest coffee farm, lots of samples of coffee that Sandy and Stacy tried and a Rum factory, Sean and Sandy tried the 'samples' given every half hour there. Sean and Brandy took a helicopter tour of the island so Sean could see the waterfalls seen in the movie "Jurassic Park" as much of those movies as well as many many TV shows were and are filmed on the Hawaiian Islands.
Next time part 2 so this won't be very long and too dated!
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