Hawaiian Adventure, Day 5: Low Key

Today was a low key day; today was a good day.  We started off by sleeping in, which was a vacation within a vacation.  We decided to head over to Kahaluu Beach which was pretty close to the hotel.  We hung out there for a couple hours, got some sun and continued on with our lazy day.  We went back to the hotel and cooked up a pizza and then just sat around with the geckos on the lanai, each of us reading our respective books.  I think at this point Bex was reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, and I was reading a Cussler novel.

We finished our books and decided to check off another item on our Hawaii Bucket List:  Visit a coffee plantation.  We decided to go to Kona Joe’s.  They’ve got an awful web site, but an absolutely stunning actual site.

We ended up on a guided tour with two other people, a couple from Colorado in their 50′s, who turned out to be either staggeringly hard of hearing or staggeringly stupid.    The tour was pretty informative, and led by a girl named Anna from Ukraine who was there on a year-long internship for a Food Science program.   I digress, the amusing part here was listening to this poor gal answer the multiple questions from the other couple multiple times.  Anna mentioned that the coffee tree in question was 4 years old, and within 40 seconds, the guy had asked how old it was twice, and his wife had followed that up with a brilliant "So how old is this coffee tree?"  Other questions that this couple asked multiple times were "When do they bloom?" and "When are they picked?"   We were so amazed at how dense they seemed to be that by the end of the tour, when she asked if there were any other questions, it was all we could do to not ask "So, how old was that coffee tree?".   We had to settle for just giggling to ourselves.

As part of the tour, we got some coffee at the end of the tour.  We ended up sitting on the lanai just soaking up the beauty of our surroundings until they politely reminded us that they had been closed for about an hour and they needed us to leave before they shut the gate.  One of my favorite afternoons of all time.

For dinner, we took the recommendation of the concierge and hit up a joint called The Fishhopper.  I had probably the best ribs I’ve ever had, and I’ve been to quite a few Ribfests back home in Minneapolis, and have a sister-in-law that lives in Austin, TX, so we get our fair share of BBQ style food.  Bex had a plate with 3 different types of fish (not positive, but offhand I think there was Mahi Mahi, Ono, and Ahi Tuna) that was pretty damn tasty too, and I’m not even very fond of fish.  We both really liked this place; the service was great, the food was fantastic, and we stuck it on our list of places we’d make sure to revisit the next time we’re back.

The rest of the evening was pretty tame.  We drove back to the condo and began the task of packing for the morning flight to Kauai.