2011 Kauai-year of the Shark

2011 Kauai---trip #10 to Kauai!  

Feb. 10-25 Year of the Shark!: vog; Hanapepe gallery night; Waimea Canyon; Na Aina Kai garden; Kanikapila Kakou concert

On about our 5th trip to Kauai, we had read in one of the visitor booklets that if you vacation to Kauai 10 times, you'll have a good chance of eventually moving there. I wonder if that'll hold true for us, too!?  Unfortunately, with this being our 10th trip to Kauai, there's still no plans for that move as of yet.

I imagine if this had been our 1st trip to Kauai, I still would have been blown away by it's beauty, but since this was our 10th, the weather made this trip ever so slightly disappointing. We had Kona winds for the whole time, which I have mixed feelings about. I like the warmer more humid weather it brings, but dislike the vog it can also bring. This year the vog was really bad because the volcano on the Big Island was being especially active. Our crisp vibrant colors of the distant hills weren't there for the whole 2 weeks of our visit. The first several days we didn't even get to see the brilliant blue/green ocean colors due to constant cloud cover. We did have quite a bit of rain, too, but that in itself doesn't bother me that much. It's the constant cloud cover and vog that were disappointing this year. Our usual routine of snorkeling all day then finding a sunset didn't work out well this year. We still snorkeled quite a bit, but by sunset, the clouds were usually too heavy to produce a pretty sunset, so most evenings we ended up just going out for an early dinner instead.

The past 2 years I've booked our flights to arrive a day or 2 before our timeshare stay started and left a day before our stay ended in order to get AA award tickets. This works out pretty well especially since we've had ocean view rooms the last 2 years and it was nice checking in when we could enjoy the view, instead of after 9pm and a long day of flying. It's also nice having the condo all day on the last day until we had to catch our red eye flight.

2011-Feb 10---Travel day:  STL-DFW-LAX-LIH

2011-Feb 10-12: Plantation Hale

2011-Feb 11: South Kauai

2011-Feb. 12: Wyndham Kauai Beach Villas, Lihue

2011-Feb. 13: Lawai, Poipu, Hanapepe

 2011-Feb. 14: Waimea Canyon

2011-Feb. 15: Anini, Kee, Tunnels

2011-Feb. 16: Kee, Tunnels

2011-Feb. 17: Na' Aina Kai

2011-Feb. 18: Anini, Hanalei

2011-Feb. 19: KBV Oceanview, Poipu, Lawai

2011-Feb. 20: Lawai

2011-Feb. 21: Anini

2011-Feb. 22: Salt Pond, Waimea pier

2011-FEb. 23: Lawai

2011-Feb. 24: East Kauai, Kee, Tunnels

2011-Feb. 25 (last day): anini

Flights home were long but uneventful. We were able to fly non-stop from LAX to STL so that cut several hours off our return flight. Arrived home about 1:30 pm from another wonderfull, but too short, Kauai vacation.