Hi Friends!

Today we travelled 35 miles to the North Shore of Kauai to visit the Kilauea Wildlife Refuge, do some shopping in Hanalei, and finish by eating again at Chicken in a Barrel. The Refuge was closed, the shopping was a bust, but the ribs at CIAB were great!

Then on the way home, we were in a small traffic delay. I hesitate to call it a traffic jam because it was just an intersection where vehicles from the north had to yield to vehicles from the south making a left turn. Since there was a line going both ways, this was accomplished one car at a time.  So, small traffic delay.

Traffic ettiquette. Are there three or four t’s in that word? I can’t seem to get a definitive answer.

In any case, “Try slow” from yesterday’s post seems to be the theme of traffic here on the island. On the North Shore there are 10 one way bridges with yield signs on both sides. Attached to the post just below the yield sign is another sign which states “Local courtesy is 5-7 cars”.  And 99.9% of the time, people heed that, even stopping before the 5-7 to allow the cars on the other side a chance. It’s amazing.  The hubster saw a car drive around the first car in line that had stopped, pass it and take the bridge, so I took out .1 %.

On our drive today I saw a large hedge trimmed into a hexagon shape around its edges. It had to be 50 yards long and 10 feet high.  And it wasn’t in any special garden sanctuary, it was just alongside the road! It does remind me to tell you that hibiscus looks very different here than it does in MN. You know how you marvel at someone’s healthy looking hibiscus growing in a pot at home? It may be four feet high with six or seven blossoms on it? Well, here they trim them. Seriously! I have seen them in seven feet high and thirty feet long hedges flat trimmed on the top!! Hedges, for crying out loud!!!

Well, they do call it The Garden Island for a reason. The hubster did remark the other day that it smelled just like the inside of the Como Conservatory!

And speaking of the hubster remindsme to  give you the Hike Addendum.  It was like a post script to the hike story, but it just didn’t fit in with the last post. Here’s the rest of the story.

When he finished his hike, and got into the car, he wasn’t done. For whatever reason, chilled, damp, tired, all of the above, he started shivering. He was completely warm on his hike, he said. But when he stopped, he shivered. In the car, I looked at his hand which was the only exposed skin I could see other than his face which is mostly beard. His hand was deathly white.  I had already been heating up the car so it would be warm, now I covered him up, putting my rain jacket on his legs. The whiteness of his hand meant that all his blood was going to his core to keep his vital organs warm.

This was scary.

I drove the 15 minutes down the road to the place I knew would fill him up with warm food, Chicken in a Barrel. I knew from the guide book that you could get a lot of good and hot BBQ food here and so I planned that we would celebrate there after his hike. And being mostly meat, the food would be okay for his diabetes.  Little did I know that this prior planning would be so helpful.

I knew I needed to get him warm and what better way than to fill him up with good warm food that he loves? And it did help.

But he wasn’t done shivering until we drove the rest of the hour home, heater on full blast.  That’s what made the drive so difficult: darkness, winding roads, 40 mph, and worry.

I did have to open my window to cool off and stay alert.  “Sometimes I drive in the winter with the heat on and the window open.” It’s something the hubster and I say to each other.

It took a few days, but he has written about his hike and attached the pics, sending it to me in an email. I haven’t seen the pics yet because we were out on the road today when I got it.

Oh, and in the email he shared a story he had found about another hiker who slid down a slope and stopped before falling the 300 feet to the surf below, on this trail in 2006:

“Lucky for him, his head smashed into a rock and arrested his fall. The impact separated his nostrils from his face, but he survived.”

I don’t think I can say much after that.

So grateful he came limping down that trail to me,

Janet