Princeville, Hawaii – Queen’s Bath

Queen’s Bath is a bit of ocean front in Princeville where the waves have carved bowls out of the old lava. During high tide the water fills those bowls and during low tide those bowls of water are pools for swimmers – human and non-human. Because we could walk to the path down to Queen’s Bath, that was the first place we visited on Kauai.

What Everyone Has in Their Driveway
What Everyone Has in Their Driveway

Since we are from Colorado where it is perfectly natural for things not to grow, we still can’t get over the lavish greenery and squandered beauty of blooming flowers everywhere. It was a visual feast and we gorged ourselves!

The path was wet from the most recent rain, and quite slippery. Sometimes Dee had to hold my hand so I wouldn’t be scared. Another thing that kept surprising drylanders like us was the amount of water that was being thrown away; in Colorado, we would sue!

Steep Path to Queen’s Bath
Random Water Fall
Path to Queens Bath
And on That Note ...
And on That Note …

At the base of the path – or may-be the beginning of the shoreline – there is a sobering sign cautioning visitors that we could actually die. We read the sign, thought about it, and went toward the water anyway, because we are responsible adults. We were glad we did.

We saw sea turtles. They were probably doing serious things like trying to eat enough to survive in an area where their natural predators were less concentrated, but from where I stood, they were just cool to watch.

There were some small swimmers and fliers in little pools. There were some adventurous human folks in the biggest bath.  A couple canoes with outriggers went by making me think that would be fun, but as I watched, I realized that they had the energy and stamina of much younger people. Shoot! They were much younger people. I decided that watching the various activities was excitement enough.

Princeville, Hawaii

You wake up early your first day in Hawaii - the full moon is a bonus
You wake up early your first day in Hawaii – the full moon is a bonus
image of Dee sleeping
Dee is good at lots of things

Getting up early in Princeville is easy when you go to bed early in Princeville. At least, that’s what I thought. Dee, may-be not so much. I even woke up before the chickens, but that was beginners luck.

Chicken with apparent Spanish ancestors.

This chicken looked at me like I was the intruder

Waking up early and watching everything wake up proved to be the perfect way for me to start our first day in Kauai.

View from Master Bedroom
Stairs to Master Bedroom Balcony

Kauai, Hawaii

Small map of Kauai, Hawaii
Map of Kauai

We flew to Kauai, Hawaii.

Why?

Well, because the Trans-Pacific Highway is not a thing and the Great Canoes of the Hawaiian Islands were never committed to a port of call in California. Once we got past thinking we had options, we locked on to the Airport in the town of Lihue.

We had reserved a place in Princeville and had printed out – and left behind – the very nice confirmation letter sent to us by the owner. No problem, we figured we’d review the details (like the address and the lockbox combination) on line as we got close, so we chatted with the car rental people about all sorts of things like: what they thought every visitor to Kauai absolutely must see and do. We should have been asking for the best way to access the internet without a local account. The car folks did their thing with the map and off we went to Princeville.

You know how you can scarcely move from one building to the next in some parts of the country without having to dodge a “Free WiFi”

House in Princeville
Here’s where we stayed. Here is the car that got us there.

sign? It’s not like that in Kauai. We reached the home we were renting , but we couldn’t remember the lockbox combination to save our lives so, we did what everyone does when they’re in that situation – we went to dinner!

Image of Bouchon's Hanalei Grill from the website
Happy Hour for Us

Yes, it was a little early. Yes we told ourselves  “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” “Yes,” they told us,  “unless you are a local subscriber, WiFi is a problem.” Then we asked, “Do you guys do Happy Hour?”

After a little comfort food in the form of sushi and a beer in front of an open window looking over a valley that has probably been lush green since creation, we realised that we could call the folks in Denver that put us on to the place and they might be able to help us over our first vacation bump. For no good reason that I’ve ever come up with, that worked!

Armed with the combination, (and well fed) we forced the lockbox to surrender the key and we were in. Inside, there was WiFi. There were beds. Life was good again. I was so happy I took one of the Coconuts from the yard and put it on the table on the deck for a centerpiece. Not realizing how we would feel about them by the end of our week, we admired the chickens roaming the yard. We went to bed early.

Deck Area Outside Living Room / Kitchen
Living Room / Kitchen

Rifle Falls – Vacation Ends

Rifle Falls State Park was our last camping destination. The bad thing about vacations is that you have to go home. Well, may-be that’s just a bad thing about short vacations, but if it is, then we’ve never been on a long vacation. Heading home means your vacation is over and we were in heading home mode.

After overnighting at Flaming Gorge, we had to drop south to Vernal, Utah before heading east and once we got into Colorado there were all sorts of little roads we had to take before we made our way to Rifle.  I think you could say that we wended, we wended our way to Rifle, CO. The falls are really pretty, the state park staff was very friendly and we decided that this was the nicest campsite of the trip.

Carts for tents, bags and food
An empty campsite
Just below the falls
Our Campsite
From the side
Through the falls
The cliff underneath the falls
Rifle Falls one more time

 

Flaming Gorge

The Flaming Gorge  sprawls across the Wyoming-Utah border and is primarily a place for land locked water lovers to soak up a little hydro-therapy. After a few days in Yellowstone National Park it was time to head home. We headed home by going south to the Gorge. The bad thing about road trips is that occasionally, you have to spend hours on the road. About six hours driving, I think, between Bridge Bay in Yellowstone and Buckboard Marina in Flaming Gorge. (Add looking at the Grand Teton National Park,  a late lunch in Jackson, and some road construction and  I’m no longer puzzled about why we cooked dinner in the dark.) Oops, I jumped ahead…

We slowly worked our way out of the south gate of Yellowstone Park which put us, almost immediately, into Grand Teton National Park. Colter Bay is well worth the stop. We saw another amazing lake, spectacular mountain peaks and a perfectly wonderful town, called Jackson on the southern end. We broke for lunch in Jackson (oh, I said that). Then, a couple hours of lonely, high, dry plains until we hit the I-80 town of Green River. If you go straight south of there you hit a reservoir caused by damming the Green River in the Flaming Gorge which is very pretty on the southern end. We spent the night at a place called Buckboard Marina. There were showers at the campground! Hot showers! We walked!

Sunrise on Yellowstone Lake From Bridge Bay
Jay copes with hours of seat time
Kay copes with hours of seat time
Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park
Grand Tetons
Zoom the peak
Grand Tetons wide angle just because …
Elk antlers in Jackson, Wy.
Lunch in Jackson, Wy.
There’s a prevailing persistant wind at the Buckboard Marina.
After Yellowstone, the campground at Buckboard Marina felt a little empty
We saw this at the Marina, the layers became more strinking as we approached the south end

 

Small Things

Smilin' and Dancin'
Smilin’ and Dancin’

There are some beautiful things that you can miss simply by being a bit early or late, looking to high or having a different target in mind. Most of these shots are of little flowers on plants somewhere between ankle and knee level that waited quietly and posed quite patiently.  The chipmunk understood the busker ethos and was quite a performer for us with pauses that were rarely longer than a blink. Here are some of the less splashy stars of Yellowstone.

 

Geysers

photo of Old Faithful
Kay and Jay at the sign with the Old Faithful geyser still gasping in the background

It’s why you go to Yellowstone isn’t it? Geysers? Old Faithful?

So we went south, clockwise around the Great Loop road from Bridge Bay Campground at 45 mph maximum, often reduced to 35 mph and occasionally to 25 miles per hour. We kept telling ourselves, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” and “We’re here to see the animals, it’s their park.” Unfortunately, we didn’t see any animals bigger than Ravens and they were staying way up high, way out of our way.

We got to Old Faithful and found parking about 10 minutes before  she blew and that was barely enough time to find it behind the Visitor Center – which does dominate the area. However, most of our fellow spectators clearly had no trouble finding it. I had trouble with the zoom on my camera too, so you might think we were a little disappointed, but we weren’t. DSCN8733Check out the girls’ smiles as they posed in front of Old Faithful while it calmed back down and the power of the eruption was waning. Really, it took us longer to find and order ice cream.

Kepler Cascades
Kepler Cascades
Kepler Cascades
DSCN8761photo of West Thumb Geyser Basin
Kay and Jay study the interpretive signs in the West Thumb Geyser Basin right on the edge of Yellowstone Lake

We retraced our path around the Great Loop, counter-clockwise this time, stopping at the Keppler Cascades before working our way back over the Continental Divide and stopping at the West Thumb Geyser Basin which doesn’t seem to have any eruptions that reach for the sky, but has fiercely hot pools of fantastic colors that change as the water overflows its cauldron’s edge and trickles toward the lake. There were mud pots where the thick bubbles popped and stunk with disolved sulfer.

West Thumb Geyser Basin
photo showing a gravel spit separating Yellowstone Lake on the left from a small oxbow pool on the right
Gravel spit separating Yellowstone Lake on the left from a small oxbow pool on the right

Our last stop was at the edge of Yellowstone Lake and we proved first hand that the water in the lake was as numbingly cold as the water in the pools was scalding hot. The little spit of land that separated the lake from a smaller pool was made of granite gravel and was extremely cruel to bare city feet. The heat of the day which inspired that dip was quickly forgotten.

Dee, Jay and Kay
Kay regretting bare feet
Jay and Kay knee deep in the pool
Dee, Jay and Kay and Lake Yellowstone

 

Bridge Bay

Just around the corner of Yellowstone Lake from no-Fishing Bridge is Bridge Bay where there is a marina and campground. We stayed there – at the campground – but the marina is pretty and we went by it a few times.

In fact we felt like we won the lottery when we pulled up to our campsite. The tent only campsites were all taken and we settled for an RV/tent site. We were assigned a site on the far end of the “B” loop from the access road which turned out to be in the trees and above what we thought of as the valley of 10,000 smokes because of all the campfires we could see.

Bridge Bay is actually named for a near-by natural bridge. Near-by means an easy 2 – 3 mile round trip hike. Natural Bridge was carved out of the stone by something called freeze-thaw plucking. Say that five times fast! It can be done – but why?