Waimea Falls With the Harveys AND Falling Asleep Laughing

We spent some of the second day with the Harveys at Waimea Valley Audubon Center. It is a 3/4 mile trek, one way, to the waterfall where Kate and Sawyer swam, on LOST. Parts of the walk are steep, other parts are flat. Wild peacocks roam the grounds. We usually see male peacocks. This day, we saw a mama peacock hovering over her babies. It was quite a sight, and quite a treat. Later on the walk, we found a large cluster of bamboo. See in the middle picture how tall these sun shelters were?! The bamboo towered over the shelters. See how Son1 and I are walking straight toward the bamboo? The best treat was hearing the wind blow the shoots into one another and hear them knocking hard toward one another. We could hear the hollowness of the shoots.

Parts of the walk the trees rose several feet in the air and created welcome canopies of shade.

Everywhere we turned there were flowers. Some of these pictures on this post are ours, and some are the Harvey's. So eat them all up!! The red flowers are a type of heliconia. They kind of look like flamingos. They cascade down from green palms. The yellow flowers grow up in a rectangular prism shape, and then taper into a cone top, with white flowers. The purple ones were just starting to open.

This banana tree is flowering while producing fruit. I had never seen such a thing! Well, not as pastel as this flower! This banana tree is a totally different variety than the kind we have in our back yard. On the left is another type of heliconia. This type shoots up out of the palms. We have this in our back yard. The last flower is ginger. These are common in the Hawaiian islands, and I wish we would have planted these in our yard, too!!

The middle picture is a flowering hibiscus.

We followed the trail to the waterfall. Now I am not sure how we were absolutely shocked. As we walked along the paved road from the entrance to the waterfall, it was completely apparent there was no water flowing into through the creek beds thirty or more feet below. This was so different than when we were here in March for the tea and with our family. We arrived and found no waterfall. The pool below was nearly empty. Summer heat and less rainfall took their toll on the waterfall, swimming hole, and running creeks. It was a little anticlimactic.

There was still the walk back, though. We experienced more of God's beauty all the way back to the car.
We jumped back in the cars, and traveled farther north to Turtle Bay. Even though this smaller beach is part of the fancy shmancy resort, it is a public beach. The waters are calm because they are protected by a reef, and a perfect entry for our small keiki. Turtle Bay Resort also owns most of the land where LOST is filmed for beach scenes and for trail scenes.

Real dads float with their kids while real moms sit on rented lounge chairs that some nice person let us use for their last 30 minutes!!

It got to be "that time." That time, being the time that if we didn't leave, there were going to be some meltdowns. We drove home around sunset, put the kids to bed, and had some adult time.

During our adult time, we laughed, laughed and laughed. We howled. I made promises that I wouldn't blog about what was said to the three other adults. Now don't worry, we weren't talking about any of y'all. It was all about the people sitting in the room.

Finally, we knew we were fading, and gave into bedtime. We said good night, and Hubby and I headed for our room. He finished brushing his teeth, and found me flopped on my tummy across our bed. He asked if I was sleeping. I sprang up into a sitting position. NOPE! I was sitting there with a grin from ear to ear. I explained to Hubby that my heart just felt very, very full. We hadn't laughed like that in weeks. The Harvey visit was just what we needed, right in the middle of the stress of selling our house, and our crazy, no date in sight, move. Their visit was a welcome distraction. We went to bed, sad that the last Harvey day was coming.