The Kauai equivalent of a county fair is the Farm Bureau fair running this weekend. We spent an enjoyable afternoon there today, it was just the right size to see everything and still have time to go to the beach afterwards. We didn’t go on any of the midway rides, but it’s nice once in while to be in a big crowd were almost everyone is excited and having fun. It’s colorful and full of life, which makes it easy to take good pictures.
Two days ago, I’d heard through the coconut wireless that the Clintons were visiting Kauai. I’m always surprised how a non-gossiper such as myself manages to hear these things. Anyways, it was nothing to blog about, especially without any proof.
But it made the news today, so it must be true. Bill, Hillary, Chelsea, and possibly her fiancé are/were here. As my original source put it, “I didn’t know they still traveled together.”
What does any of this change? Nothing at all, which is why we call it gossip. But it is interesting to note that many celebrities visit here, a reminder of the away-from-it-all-yet-luxurious segment of the local tourism industry. Soon after moving here, we met a guy who works at the private jet terminal at the airport. He sees them all come and go, rolls out the carpet for them, loads their bags, refuels their planes, and keeps his job by not saying anything about them–and gets good tips I imagine.
Like some not-so-rich-and-famous visitors, a few celebrities have bought into the island dream as well. Bette Midler owns much land between Wailua and Kapaa town, though I think that is more about buying into the real-estate boom than living here. It is agricultural land, so her property manager runs cattle on it, and she is generally open to community needs such as when they wanted to run bypass road through her property. Ben Affleck (or is it Ben Stiller, to me he’s just the recent movie star whose name starts with Ben) owns a house on the North Shore and vacations there off-and-on. A friend told me he was with his family at Kalihiwai beach the day we got married there last year. I wouldn’t be able to recognize him, even if he was on any of the photos.
I’m filing this under journalism so I don’t have to create a “gossip” category.
As promised, here are photos of the beach that Sonja and I go to most often because it is the closest to our house. It’s about a mile away, just across the main highway. We used to walk there, but sometimes we go at lunch and take the car to go quicker.
Looking left:
Looking right:
The beach is probably almost a half-mile long, at the far end (to the right) is the Wailua river mouth. The river makes the water murky at times, but it’s better right now in the summer. The waves here are moderate because of the wide sandy beach, but there are surf breaks over low rocks at either end. During the summer, the waves are low and you can snorkel over the rocks to the left. The main highway is right next to the beach, but you can barely see it through the vegetation and you can’t hear it all because of the waves.
For now, the beach is mostly deserted except for a few tourists during the day, and some local kids in the afternoon. That will change soon because the Coco Palms hotel on the other side of the highway will be entirely rebuilt with some 300 rooms and condos. The hotel was made famous as the setting for Elvis’s Blue Hawaii movie, but it has been closed since it was battered by hurricane Iniki in 1992. The old buildings will be torn down early 2006, and reconstruction finished by 2008, according to this article.
If you like the view, there are other condos right above the beach for sale: $675,000.
Hawaii made the national news today with the announcement of the first gas price regulations (called the gas cap) in the country. It was even reported in California, a state with similar prices for gas and other cost of living expenses. Without going into the politics of regulation, I think the intent of the gas cap is to align wholesale prices to those on the mainland in order to keep the two local refiners (on Oahu) from profiting from their geographical monopoly.
I took this picture yesterday in Kapaa, thinking that it might be the last time I see gasoline prices under $3 per gallon here. The gas cap price set for the island of Kauai this week could theoritically bring it down to $2.92 (2.80 wholesale cap price + 0.12 average station markup).
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All photos on this website are my own unless otherwise noted. Nearly all are taken with a 2-year old HP Photosmart 735 (3.2 megapixel) point-and-shoot digital camera (5732 photos so far). The images are generally very good quality, except in certain lighting conditions such as the contre-jour in the picture of the goats. There you can see the distortion around the edges at wide angles and washed out colors in the light.
If you click on most photos, you’ll see the large version. Please feel free to save any photos for personal use. If you republish them non-commercially, please include a link to this site (http://great-hikes.com/blog). For commercial use, pinch me to make sure I’m not dreaming, and then we’ll work out a deal. I have lots of other photos that I might put into a portfolio someday.
Update 2009-06-14: I’m removing the high-res images from the blog, mostly because they’re taking up too much space on my hosting provider. But also because every now and then, I see my images copied elsewhere on the internet. I usually don’t mind and just ask for a link back, but I’d like to remove some of the temptation.
The small images that remain are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. If you would like to use larger versions of the images, please contact me.