2011-Feb. 17: Na' Aina Kai

I'm a sucker for gardens. When I learned Na' Aina Kai was a reciprocol garden to our Missouri Botanical Gardens, I decided it was time to see what this garden is all about. In previous years we've been to McBryde and Limahuli and enjoyed their tropical natural gardens. Would love to go to Allerton some day, but may have to win the lottery first. Anyway, Na' Aina Kai botanical gardens are the estate gardens of a wealthy resident couple of Kauai. After showing their "yard" off to friends and friends of friends for many years, they finally moved off the estate and donated the grounds to Kauai. There are several different tours offered, but the free recipocol tour was their $35 1.5 hour walking tour. I even extended my Mo Botanical Garden membership before we left home so I could add Ken's name onto the membership and he could get in free, too. Here's the parking lot to the garden office.

Our tour actually lasted about 2 hours and we were invited to wander around some more by ourselves after the guided tour. I highly recommend this tour. It's more formal then the other gardens and just as beautiful, just in a more structured way.

 Plus it's a sculpture garden so there are a lot of neat sculptures

 a really neat pool area

 part of the cactus garden

a couple of the many types of palms here

the original owners of the house and gardens

 Even though we had a lot of sun during our tour, we were also rained on off and on throughout the tour.

After spending the afternoon at the garden, we headed back to the East side stopping by the bike path north of Kapaa and wandering along it for awhile.

With sunset out of the question again, we headed to Kapaa for the Brick Oven Pizza buffet night.