Sabbatical

Ok, so I wasn't really on Sabbatical, as that seems to last officially for one year. But nonetheless, I've been AWOL since we went to Kauai. So here's what's been going on...

Kauai was absolutely gorgeous. We even had sun on the day we arrived and the day we returned. It rained all the days in-between. We were apparently lucky, however, because two weeks after we were there, a damn broke and the flood apparently took out some roads, homes, and a couple of people, including a 22 year-old woman from Washington state there for her wedding.

We could have been seriously hurt by the rains, as we all do things that are a little dumb. Take, for instance, the day my camera got flooded. We wanted to hike the powerline trail one day, even though it was just drizzling where we were staying. There are two parking lots, separated by a bridge going over a small stream. When we started our trip, the bridge was dry. We hiked for a couple of hours, had a nice picnic in the rain and then went back down the hill. Along the way, I took some ok photographs, but as I mentioned above, that was the death of my camera. When we got back to the bottom of the trail, there were a couple of SUV's on the trail-side of the bridge, with people in them, just hanging out.

As we approached the bridge, we noticed that water was flowing over it. Since I noticed that there was a big pothole right in the middle of the bridge when we came over in the morning, I figured we'd be safe if we just avoided the hazard. Of course, the water was so deep, up to our knees in places, and flowing at quite a good clip, so it was hard enough just to walk, especially with cobalt in a backpack on my back! In retrospect, it was probably stupid for us to cross. But at that time, we needed to get into something warm and dry.

So we waded back across, slowly, to the other side and returned safely. After we got to the car, a rather large 4x4 came barreling through with a group of pre-teens in the bed, having a blast on someone's birthday. Apparently, the driver worked there and was experienced in this kind of flooding. A little later, a Toyota Tacoma 4x4 barely made it through, returning from boar-hunting.

The rest of the trip was spent hiking, snorkeling and overall trying to avoid the rain. We finally caught a little bit of sun on our last day as we made our way to the western-most part of the island to queen's pond beach. The road was so bad that we had to ditch the car and hike in to the beach. On the way back, Cobalt got his first taste of hitch-hiking. Well, we didn't exactly hitch, as some good folks stopped and offered us a ride. And since they could only take us half-way back, as they were headed out another road than our car was on, we no sooner got out of their convertible when an SUV stopped and delivered us to our car. Thank you good folks from Michigan and Seattle!

BTW, writing this several weeks afterwards, I realize that my memory isn't as good as it used to be (or should be, rather) and that if I don't write here more often I'll just let it go away, which I'd prefer not to do. So here's to updating my blog more often...CHEERS!