Our peaceful beach drive was abruptly interrupted by an explosion. My amygdala registered a 7.0 on the fight/flight Richter scale. I chose (well, I didn’t choose, it was reflex) flight, which in a car meant crouching and yelling out with cowardice. Then my frontal lobe began rifling through possible explanations for what had happened. Did the car run over something? No, I didn’t feel us hit anything. Was there an explosion? Yes, there was most certainly an explosion off the road to our back right side. I reached this conclusion approximately 3 seconds after the noise.
Kelly and I still can’t say with 100% certainty what it was, but leading evidence points to Kelly’s explanation: our car was struck by a falling coconut. We stopped the car and checked the roof, and sure enough there was a wet spot with trace amounts of debris on the right back of the car. We were going to have it checked out by a forensics team, but alas there is no CSI Hawaii (yet, but give it a few more seasons). I vowed to pray less hard for Piña Coladas.
The wind and high tide at Ke’e beach made for bad snorkeling conditions. We spent more time watching the wild chickens run around the beach poking their beaks into people’s bags for food. We left Ke’e for Tunnels Beach just down the road, which had similarly bad conditions. We were a bit bummed and wondered if we had overestimated the snorkeling.
In preparation for the anticipated great snorkeling, Kelly and I splurged before our trip on good quality masks and snorkels. They worked really well. Kelly finally got a mask that doesn’t leak on her. And we bought the top quality snorkels, which are absolutely worth it. They are fully surrounded at the top, so no water can splash in, and when you swim under water, a valve shuts the hole so that when you come back up, you can breathe without having to clear the snorkel. Brilliant, and it actually worked, which I couldn’t believe.
That night, we went to the Princeville resort for a drink and dinner. The resort had ridiculous views of the ocean, including the surfers and paddle surfers catching sunset waves. Paddle surfing, which it seems is now somewhat popular on Kauai, is where you stand on the surfboard the whole time with a paddle in hand, and row yourself into waves. From what I saw, paddle surfers have a hard time catching waves. I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be the next “snowboarding” (which caught up to/took over skiing). We had a fancy meal at the resort, then went home and got to bed nice and early to the sound of crashing waves outside our window.
