While we were at Vince’s graduation in June, my mother turned to me and said – I really want to go to Hawaii – and then I said – so what do you want to see in Hawaii? – and then she said – I want to see plants. So in an act of filial piety, I arranged a week-long trip to Hawaii for my parents – all.plants.all.the.time. I wanted to go to only one island, so we are on the plant island – Kauai. They are footing the bill; I’m the travel agent and chauffeur. We are about 75% of the way through the trip and it’s been both fun and, as vacations always are, full of not-good sleep nights, little spats, lots of talk about pooping (both too much and not enough).
Here we go – Hawaii, it turns out, is a long way from DC – my parents are based in Portland right now. So I took one day to get to Portland, stayed over at my parent’s house and then the next day, we flew to Lihue Airport in Kauai (stopover in Honolulu). Flying to Hawaii is interesting – everyone on the plane is on vacation, so it makes for a kind of festive kind of flight. (though the person next to me was working on an excel spreadsheet? )
We split the week into two parts, one on the north shore (a little more rustic, rainy with lots of dangerous but beautiful surf and lots of plants) and one on the south shore (more resorts, better beaches, more tourist amenities).
I chose well for our first airbnb (not so much for the 2nd one, we’ll get to that later). Sunning view this is from the lanai (balcony). Unbelievably gorgeous and breezy.
First day, I knew we were going to get up early so we went to Ha’ena Beach Park and watched the sunset – my most favorite beach of this trip, the entire strip of sand to ourselves, the gorgeous sun coming up over the clouds.
This is my favorite photo of the trip. I’m leaning up against my father who is making a funny face and my mom is kind of littering in the way that she does throwing a banana peel into the bushes. Can you see the flying banana? Classic Rena – honestly.
Then we went to Princeville Botanic Gardens, a private garden which was lovely. There were plants, there was a chocolate tasting. All good things. There were little bridges and steps to connect everything. I thought it was nicely done. Because we are doing all plants all the time, we are going on 4 botanical garden tours, this is the first we would hear of many of the same stories about famous plants in Hawaii. Excellent – 5 stars.
The cacao tree – super interesting. Those pods grow from the trunk from the flowers on the trunk. And if you leave the pods on the tree and they overripe and die, they get sucked back into the tree for nourishment.
The next day we went to Na ‘Aina Kai Botanical Gardens which is also a private garden (by a couple named the Dotys) and this was super weird. Like really weird. This person loved these kind of kitschy sculptures – like hundreds of these all around the property and random themed planting all around. She also decided to like build an entire Alaskan village complete with enormous fake glaciers. The tour guide was a personal friend of the Doty’s, and kind of refused to answer where all the money came from, but some internet snooping afterward led me to the fact that the woman was the ex-wife of Charles Shultz of Peanuts fame. So all this is Snoopy money.
Besides the weirdness, they did have some absolutely gorgeous things – I really liked the plantations of teak and other hardwoods, those are really lovely areas – almost cathedral like – and this particular point was unbelievable gorgeous. Off in the distance, you can see Mark Zuckerberg’s 800 acre plot of land that he’s building a “house” on – I read that it was more of a compound than a single dwelling. Well, it’s a lovely spot for sure. The guide was sure the island spirits are going to kick him off soon enough. Hawaiians are big into their island energy here.
The third place we went to was the Limihuli Garden and Preserve – (I, for whatever reason, have no pictures of us at this garden). This was a 5-star place, really enjoyable and probably the most botanically knowledgeable guide – all these places, I booked the morning tours which lasted about 2.5 to 3 hours. Also, I believe the most stunningly gorgeous of all the gardens we went to, but alas, somehow no photos. (Looks exactly like Moana. Sersly.).
I got a photo of a plant.
Next we’ll head south.
What a fun excursion!