Aloha Kauai: Days 2 & 3

For a recap of the very start of our vacation, click here!

On the second day of our trip, we were delusional and ambitious and decided to take on an 'easy' hike along the coast of the West Coast of the island. According to my research, there was a long 11 mile hike that required permits or an 'easy' 2 mile hike to a secret beach and back.

Maybe for serious hikers, it would have been easy. But for me, it definitely wasn't. It was beautiful, but it was also 98% humidity, all up and down hill, and completely coated in mud. I was not prepared, but knowing it was only two miles out and two back kept me alive. In hindsight, I'm very glad I did it, but I underestimated it.

Right before you get to the secret beach, you have to traverse a creek. You are supposed to jump from slippery rock to slippery rock. I tried and made it about midway through before falling in. After wadding to the other side, I tried to push it out of my mind. It wasn't until afterward when looking through Dan's pictures did I realize that he had managed to catch this lovely image of me immersed in the creek while the strangers on the other side judged me. Yay...

But like I said, we survived. It was a rough morning for me, but I would definitely try it again. Better prepared, though...

After a veeeeeeeeeery long shower, which still managed to not get all the mud off my legs, we spent the rest of the day exploring the nearby areas of Hanalei and Princeville. We ate way too much shaved ice at Jojo's, caught the sunset overlooking the Kilauea lighthouse, and grubbed down dinner at Bubba Burgers.

After barely surviving the hike, the next day was much more chill. On the way to the trailhead, we passed the Limahuli Garden and Preserve entrance. We spent the morning strolling the grounds and learning about the native plant-life. Our intentions were good to become accquainted with the natural Hawaiian culture, but by the end of it, we were just immature idiots making jokes about plant names. Wili wili...

After a lovely morning of learning, we went into Hanalei for lunch. I pressured Dan into trying authentic Hawaiian barbecue at L & L's and I had pizza down the street at Tahiti Nui's, famous for being a location in the George Clooney movie, The Descendants.

While our rental house was basically on the beach, Dan was concerned that it was not a safe beach to swim. After a bit of research, he found Haena beach park near the trail head, with a life-guard and everything. The views were incredible. The bay on one side and the cliffs of the rain forest on the other. I am training myself to be more comfortable in the ocean, but this desert rat has a long way to go. I think I managed to wade for roughly ten minutes before a large wave knocked me over and I basically crawled back up onto the beach. There was so much sand in my bikini bottoms that Dan was concerned about it clogging the shower drain.

We finished the day with a fresh dinner at Bouchon's in Hanalei. It was the perfect way to start our vacation. We did a lot, we saw a lot, we ate a lot. It's all I ever really ask for in my vacations.

Aloha Kauai: Day 1

I know I am not the most consistent blogger, but one of the reasons I've been missing lately is we finally got around to taking a nice, relaxing vacation. A full week on the North Shore of Kauai. It was amazingly beautiful and I miss it just thinking about it.

We've been to Hawaii before, but this time was different for two reasons: 1) we chose Kauai instead of Oahu and 2) we tried AirBnb for the first time.

Last time, we stayed Turtle Bay and had a lovely time, but in looking back, our favorite moments we outside of the hotel. We ran the numbers and realized that having a beach house to ourselves for a week was slightly cheaper than staying in a nice hotel, so I talked Dan into it.

This was the beautiful beach house. Technically, it wasn't on the beach, but it was house, then street, than beach. When it's a sixty second walk across the front yard to a beach, it counts as a beach house.

The waves weren't safe for swimming on our beach, but they were safe enough to wade through almost every morning.

Another great feature of the beach house was the two horses that lived next door. I don't really understand it, but I think it's a big thing there to let livestock graze on properties to keep the grass and weeds down. This was the view from the kitchen. Seriously, paradise.

The other part of the trip that was awesomely unexpected was the upgrade of our rental car to a Jeep. My husband is a Jeep man. He's got a great '91 YJ that he's had since high school. The fact that we got a free upgrade to a Jeep was the cherry on top for him. And he got to spend the trip attempting to talk up the hard-top Jeep so he can upgrade his own.

Most of the first day we spent settling in and stocking up on groceries at the local Foodland. I'll slowly go through our whole trip, but it'll be a while, like the Mexican food we ordered from Federico's as our first meal on the island. Seriously, my chimichanga took forever...

Mini Trip to Minneapolis

A couple of weeks ago, I took a trip to Minneapolis, for business. Due to flight delays, working on my feet for eight to ten hours straight, and pure exhaustion, we didn't get to venture out much. One of my favorite coworkers and I stayed in the heart of downtown, but we didn't see much other than the customer we were sent to see and restaurants. Very good food, but that was the sum of the trip.

I did manage to remember to take one picture of the downtown skyline from within. It was much more modern and developed than I anticipated. Sorry stereotypes.

I don't know what that building is, but it sure is pretty.

Why Not Spokane?

Last week, my mom, my sister, and I took a trip to the great city of Spokane. Over the past year, a bunch of our extend family decided to all relocate to Spokane. And now that they've settled in, we expected them to host us. We spent the week reconnecting with my grandmother, aunt, cousins, and cousin babies (like second cousins or something? I don't know) and exploring Spokane.

My aunt's house was fairly close to the Spokane River that we would walk down to it in the evenings. Compared to the desert, this was something completely foreign to me. Trees, green, water. It was great.

We even saw some sort of water critter. {Sidenote: Mom, sorry to include this video. I love your commentary. If you want me to remove it, I will.}

Another foreign concept was enjoying meals out on the deck without instantly exploding into flames. Mojo was sad that I wouldn't share my breakfast with him.

While we did enjoy our down time to chill and catch up, my aunt tried to fill each day with some sort of experience. Day one was a visit to Lake Couer d'Alene, right across the Idaho border. We started down some of the trials around the lake and the kids splashed in the water. It was a beautiful and peaceful spot.

Our second day was full of the best peaches I've ever had. Apparently Spokane has a whole pick-your-own produce suburb of town. It's a loop drive full of farms that have almost every time of produce and late July/early August is peach season. I was so happy because peaches are my favorite fruit and it's so hard to get good peaches in Tucson. Ninety-five percent of the time, they're either rock hard or mealy. So we packed everybody up and headed off to the farm. We rode a tractor out to the peach orchard and filled four boxes full of peaches and apricots. We ate peaches straight from the tree. I don't know how my cousin's four year old did it, but she must have had at least four peaches. She would walk through the lines of trees with a peach in one hand and my sister's hand in the other. It was one of the cutest things I've seen in a long time, kid wise. After filling up on fruit, we spent a good amount of time petting sheep, playing in a gravel pit/sand box thing, and sliding down the world's most uncomfortable slide. Eventually, we worked out a system where my sister would load my cousin's kids at the top of the slide and I would catch them as they shot out of the bottom. Top it off with some fresh peach lemonade and it was a great day. And an evening of board games. My Catan luck has been terrible lately. No matter how good the odds, my numbers never come up.

On our last day, we 'rafted' the Spokane River. For some odd reason, my aunt decided as soon as we arrived that we should take a rafting trip down the Spokane. Of course, she didn't want to join us, but the three of us and my cousin would love it. On the way back from peach picking, we stopped at Target to stock up on supplies, like water-wicking clothes. When we returned home to book our trip, the trip we wanted to book was all full up. It took a couple of tries, but we finally got ourselves signed up for a raft. We would have been so embarrassed if we'd excitedly bought all these new clothes and couldn't catch a raft.

Because it was late in the summer, all the winter run-off had already occurred so the water level in the river was really low. Low enough so that you really couldn't call what we did 'rafting'. It was more like a leisurely five mile float where we occasionally paddled when all momentum was lost. Not that I'm complaining, it was a great time. We saw an otter and an osprey, not at the same time. We splashed in the cool, clear water. We tried to interpret the meanings of the graffiti on the bridges we floated under. We did survive some low, slow rapids, so I can say I've white water rafted, but only in the most official sense.

It was a great trip. Next time, we'll definitely be more prepared for all the outdoorsy-ness of it, but we survived.

Miss Carolyn Goes to Washington

Last week, I got to visit Washington DC courtesy of work. Well, technically it was the suburb of DC that houses the Dulles airport and my team only made it into the actual city for about four hours. And it was probably the most stressful work trip I've ever taken. Let's start at the beginning.

I flew out of Tucson on Monday. Since the Tucson airport is fairly small, I had a layover in Dallas. The Dallas-Fort Worth Airport had been good to me in the past; this was the trip that was to change my mind. The full list of things that went wrong were:

• The plane to DC arrived 45 minutes late from Ohio
• It had a flat tire which took another 45 minutes to repair
• Once the plane was airborne, the pilot announced the altimeter was broken and we would need to return to Dallas since there was weather in Virginia. And because we could not land with a full tank of fuel, we would have to remain in the air until we used it up. 
• When we were back on the ground, they announced they had another plane, so we all got off and moved to that gate. At this point, it was almost midnight. Also, at this point, the flight attendants hours had rolled over and they couldn't legally work anymore. They announced they were bringing in a new crew, but they never told us if they were in the airport or just somewhere in Dallas. 
• Once the crew got there, anyone who had an electronic boarding pass had to have a paper one printed because they were literally tearing tickets as they boarded us. And we were told to rush because the pilots hours rolled at 12:30. It was the closest I've come to seeing a full-blown mob scene. 
• We only had two more delays after that: there was no crew to push us back from the gate and there was no crew to fill out and file the paperwork necessary for us to take off. 

After all of that, my head finally hit the pillow of my hotel bed at 4:52AM. It was the longest night I've had in a long time, especially since I had to be ready to work at 9AM.

The work itself was its own brand of stressful. I'd done trips like this before, but usually I would work with three or four people. This time? Twenty. There were twenty people. It was like herding cats, but herding cats is actually fairly easy if you know what you're doing. This was herding sexist, old men who think they know best about a product they've never seen before.

It was a long day and things did not go well. We had to call it around 4PM to wait for unbroken parts to ship overnight. That's always a good sign. The rest of the day was a late lunch, willing myself to stay awake until the sun set, and a dinner of the leftover chips from lunch and some Reese's pieces.

Fortunately, only three guys showed up on the second day and we were able to get things to run the way they are supposed to.

Since I was out of my zombie state and we finished with a couple of hours to spare, my team headed into the city. It happened to be the day that the metro system was 100% closed so everyone was driving and traffic was insane. It only took 90 minutes to drive a distance Google said would take 30. The only things that were still open were the monuments so we saw as many as possible.

We started on the Lincoln Monument end of the mall...

...and then headed toward the opposite end, towards the Washington Monument.

We stopped and paid our respects at the Korean War Memorial along the way.

I imagine the springtime flowers in DC rival almost everywhere else. These are magnolias?

A beautiful sunset.

The running joke of the evening became why the Washington Monument had this creepy red blinking eyes. I still don't know why, my guess was it's a warning to aircraft. In our exhausted states, though, it was a hilarious inside joke.

We found a place for dinner near the White House. After a big dinner at finally the correct time to eat food, we spent some time starring at the White House, trying to figure out why Washington's creepy eyes kept following us.

We took a detour back to the car that was a bit dodgy, but we did get to admire the Jefferson Monument off in the distance.

And with that, we headed back to Tucson the next morning. Fortunately, there were absolutely no issues with my flights on the way back. Another stop in Dallas with another small pizza.

I've got another scheduled in the upcoming weeks, but this one burnt me out pretty badly. I may or may not have already started to come up with excuses to get out of it. If it ends up happening, I'm sure I'll find a way to have a good time, but it's still a lot to wrap my head around right now.

I Can't Stay Away from You, England

It had been almost a year since my last business trip to England, so off my manager and I went.And this time, it was to a whole new customer which meant whole new cities.

This time, we were based in Southampton, so in our first bit of free time for exploring, we drove toward the coast and just wandered around.

My boss likes old architecture and history bits, so he directed us that way.

Towards crumbling churches,

and the remnants of the former town wall,

and the ports, where the Titanic sailed from.

This was all well and good, but I made sure to swing by a Superdrug to stock up on all of the British only products I had been missing. I even used part of that bath bomb bar during my hotel stay to take a nice bath after a long night of work.

Because we actually worked overnight on this trip, there was a lot more time to go exploring. I was a zombie from exhaustion for the majority of it, but still. We got to see a lot.

The second day of exploring, one of my coworkers who is based in Germany came with us and he really wanted to see the preserved boats of Portsmouth. So off we headed to a slightly different coastline.

At the end of the day, we had dinner in one of Jamie Oliver's restaurants, which was a first for me. Who knows? Maybe it's the English equivalent of Olive Garden, but it was damn yummy. Only downside was that he hovered over me in book form for the whole meal. A little creepy.

On this trip, I finally talked my boss into going in to London. We boarded a train from Southampton and spent the morning at the Natural History Museum.

Do you know what the Natural History Museum has? Dinosaurs! So many dinosaurs!!!!

From there, we grabbed lunch at Pret A Manger and spent the afternoon taking in the touristy sites of the city. Like Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament,

and Trafalgar Square,

and the British Museum. Unfortunately, the museum closed about 20 minutes after we arrived, so it was a mad scramble to see as much as possible. I'd visited it before with Dan, so I wasn't heartbroken, but I did get to see some of my favs.

For the first time since my first trip to England when I was 15, I saw the Tower of London. I mean, I didn't want to go in and the crown jewels and stuff, but the outside was cool. We walked to entire perimeter, strolled the river by Tower Bridge, and then went and finished up the day with a big (veggie) burger dinner.

So, after a very long day, we took the subway back to Waterloo station to catch a train back to Southampton. If you're a newbie to their train system, it can be quite overwhelming, staring up at all the boards of train lines and schedules, trying to find the train that will get you home right now. After a few minutes, we had figured it out, gotten through the turnstile, and were hustling toward the train.

Apparently, the train was about to leave, so my boss ran up to it and hopped on. However, he hopped on a first class carriage, so I shouted at him to wait because we didn't have first class tickets and so we should go down the train in get in one of the other cars. But as soon as he jumped onto the train, the door slammed shut behind him and I was left standing on the platform alone.

Now, maybe there was a way to delay the train and get him off of it or get me onto it, but that really wasn't clear at the time. So I just stood there as the train rolled away.

What followed was about 20 minutes of me figuring out how to get back through the turnstile, finding another train to take, and just general panicking. Fortunately, I figured it out and headed back to the hotel. Here's my evidence of my solo train trip, with the conductor checking tickets. My train had fewer stops than his so I ended up at the station about five minutes after him.

It was a hell of a trip. A tiring, draining trip that, although fun, has put me off traveling for a while. At least traveling with people, I suppose...