Yesterday was a full day of fun! We started at the highly-recommended Poipu Beach on the south side of the island. We started out with snorkels, but ours didn’t work very well, so we ended up just resting and sunning in the sand. After a couple of hours of hanging out and smelling cigarette smoke from other people on the beach, we grabbed lunch at a place called Bubba’s Burgers nearby. We were hoping for some great burgers, but what we got was just same-old same-old.

After lunch, we hit another beach called Shipwreck Beach near the Hyatt resort. The waves were pretty rough — not good for swimming or snorkeling, but we got out our rented boogy boards and had a blast riding the waves into the shore for the next hour. Debbie kept getting knocked over by the waves, but we all had fun. We came back to the condo and soaked in the hot tub for a while, but my neck is still stiff from our first round of beach fun.

Last night, we went to a luau at the Smith Family farm. It was a great meal and a pretty good show for a really high price, but we were really tired. We were ready to come home halfway through the show, but then we would have missed a pretty cool fire-knife demonstration. We collapsed into bed, dead tired and full of sun.

Today, we had an early morning — we had to leave our condo in Kapaa by 6:00 to be at the marina in Port Allen for a boat tour. Captain Andy’s was supposed to take us up to the Na Pali coast on the northwest side of the island, but Kauai is having extremely high surf right now, including 40- to 50-foot swells. That meant that we couldn’t go north, we had to go east past some of the places that we’d already visited in person.

We spotted a big group of dolphins that were breaching and even saw a couple of them jump. They had us get out into the water (in better snorkel gear) and we saw neat fish and a turtle. I was able to touch the turtle on the back. They fed us a pretty good breakfast and lunch, but we thought that we should have gotten a discount because we weren’t drinking their beers like everyone else was. Overall, it was a good tour with a good crew — but I wish that we could have seen the 4000-foot cliffs of Na Pali.

After our tour, we drove up the Waimea Canyon. It was just a nice drive up to see a pretty lookout over a really big canyon. Afterward, we got shave ice at the best-rated place on the island, called JoJo’s. We considered it a birthday present for Debbie, since she turned 30 today.