100th post : Kauai

To all our faithful blog readers,

This is our 100th post! We have pictures to show you from our amazing trip to Kauai. Kara and I had never been to any of the Hawaiian islands and were excited to go for the first time. Kauai lived up to its reputation as the "green" island. Some of you may be familiar with the Kauai coast and landscape as it has been featured in movies like Jurassic Park. Below, we will post some of the pictures from the trip. We stayed at a wonderful hotel and one of our favorite features was the waterslide. On the last day we finally figured out how to go faster -- lay on your back and raise your tail end in the air.

One of our biggest adventures in Kauai was hiking Waimea Canyon. It is known as the little Grand Canyon of Hawaii. It was a 7 mile hike that was described as "moderate to strenuous". We were treated to stunning views, baby boars (Matt still thinks they were just pigs) and a waterfall at the end.

Here was the view from the lookout point before we started.

Here was a view on the hike.

The next day we drove to the north shore. We pulled off the side of the road to get this picture.

We finally arrived at Ke'e Beach. This beach boarders the Napali Coast which is a series of steep cliffs that run right into the ocean. The surf was very high that day.

The cliff on the left is the Napali Coast. We stayed on the beach till sunset.

Friday, we visited the Wailua Falls. This was the only day it rained. We spent most of our time shopping.

Saturday was great beach weather. We drove on a dirt road for 2 miles to this beach near our hotel. We then hiked for 10 minutes and found this amazing little cove. The water was the prettiest we saw on the island.

We don't know what to say about this.

We visited the Opaeka Falls on Sunday. A man asked us how long we had been married while were there to which Matt answered "too long". On the way back past the man, he clarified 4 1/2 years.

This is the Spouting Horn. We stayed for about 3 minutes and decided we'd seen all there was to see.

Monday we again found the beach. The picture at the top of this post is the palm tree that provided our shade. We also were entertained by roosters and chickens. They roam free on Kauai and crow at all times of the day. We caught this one on the beach. After a little walk around he borrowed someone's beach towel.

Here is a picture of the rare Monk Seal. We saw one almost every beach we went to. We're wondering how rare they really are!

This cliff was a part of the beachfront at our hotel .

We watched the sun set from the cliff pictured above.

We had a great time on our trip but were glad to come back to more Christmas like weather in the Bay Area.