Finally, the day before we leave Kauai, I decide to blog…

I promised I’d blog often and I broke my promise.  I just hope you’re all (all six of you remaining readers) my Facebook friends because I haven’t been exactly quiet there.

So, where did we leave off?  Ah yes, a full week ago, when we arrived at this Marriott paradise!

Since then, we’ve done a lot of… well, this:

Some of this (in actual water)…

And this:

And of course this:

We’ve had a few adventures, planned by the “Blue Bible Man,” Tom:

A hike down a secret trail to Kauai’s “secret pools” was the highlight of our day trip to the North Shore:

And then (between torrential downpours that have lasted on and off all week)…

…we went to Ke’e Beach, which is at the end of the road, just before the NaPali cliffs (where of course there’s no road).

This poor sweet guy (whose ear had been half chewed off by some creature) just wanted to come home with us.  And I wish I could have taken him!

We stopped at a few other North shore beaches on our way back to Poipu…

It seems that every time we got in the car, this would happen…

And then when we wanted to see a site, the sun would suddenly come out for us!

We didn’t see the Napali Coast from the air or the sea this time like we did last time, but we did visit Waimea Canyon…

And we drove as far as possible on the south side of the island, to where the dunes rose around us, the NaPali Cliffs rose above us, and the beach was wide (and wide open):

We had a guest visitor as we attempted to take our own pictures…

Fortunately, someone stopped by and offered to do it the right way!

I did my best to capture some of the more dramatic natural wonders of the island, like Spouting Horn blowhole…

(…and the view in the opposite direction, which I thought was just as fabulous.)

I spent quite a bit of time attempting to catch the beauty of the island with my camera lens.  The flowers of the island are spectacular!

But mostly, I just tried every evening to capture the majesty of the Kauai sunset.  I got close, but truly, photos just don’t do it justice.

Tonight we celebrated Tom’s birthday.  There’s nowhere he’d rather be on his birthday and heading home to cold and cloudy Seattle tomorrow won’t be easy!

But we will be back!  Next time, though, we plan to finally visit the Big Island.  Stay tuned!