Phil's visit - the remainder

This is out of temporal order, but who really cares anyway.

During Phil's weekend visit, we attempted to do an epic hike on Saturday but found ourselves trapped in terrible traffic in Kapa'a. Actually it was the worst I had ever seen it. As our car slowly crept down the bypass I began to realize that when we moved forward, it coincided with cars in the other lane driving past us. After a few minutes I figured out that the only reason we were moving in the first place was that people inline front of us had given up and turned around to return back from whence they came thereby creating the space for us to move forward. We joined suit, turned the car around, and drove back the north side of the island and made an impromptu stop in Kilauea at the lighthouse, this quaint church and the lava pools at Secret beach.

Read the sign on the right. Its like they knew we were going to visit....

Inside this quaint small church are some kickass stained glass windows. The colors were ultravivid. I like this image of the agrarian Jesus, sort of the Johnny Appleseed for Our Souls.

Well, maybe not my soul but I am sure he has big plans for yours. Speaking of Jesus and his dad - God, I have been struck lately by the strangest reaction I have been getting from some older retirees I have met at the condo. When they learn about me and my search for the spider their reaction is to tell me they are going to pray for me. Pray for me to find the spider. And they tell me this in all sincerity. I want to tell them to petition God for real change - end of starvation, poverty, or any of the ills of the world that create major human suffering.

Praying to God so I can find some obscure spider in the middle of the pacific seems like a colossal waste of God's time. Weird.

As I have mentioned before, Phil has a fascination with grave sites. I found this very moldy looking grave in the front yard of the church. Many of the headstones were 80+ years old. Some with descriptions on how the individual was killed. It was not this particular stone, but Phil saw a gravestone describing how 3 guys were killed in an explosion in a sugar mill.

I had a really strong desire to lay down on this soft cusion of moss. I was prevented beacuse I also had a vivid image of skeletal hands lunging out of the soft soil and grabbing and pulling me down....down....down.

We drove down to the end of the street from the church to go to the Kilauea lighthouse and bird sanctuary.


Normally I really try to avoid having people in my photos, unless I am specifically photographing them. I realized I never took a picture of the lighthouse when I previously visited here. I waited for this old man to photograph the sign and leave. I waited and waited and waited as the old man leaned in and leaned out as the sign blew in the wind, he shifted from portrait to landscape and then back again, and he fiddled in front of the sign for 5 minutes, never taking the picture. As my patience was leaving me I realized he was becoming more interesting than the lighthouse so I finally quit waiting for him to leave and included his obvious frustration in my lighthouse portrait.

After leaving the lighthouse , which you can see perched on the cliff on the top left horizon, we drove down to Secret beach to hike to the lava pools. I had taken Phil to Queen's bath earlier but in the summer the opulent and lush pool becomes a dehydrated stagnant puddle, the surf is not strong enough to flush it out and refill it. The lava pools at Secret beach are also nice and they do stay fresh and filled even in the summer surf. But as you can see in this photo, the surf was more winteresque than summeree.

This is one of the first lava pools you come across in the long hike (see strip of tan beach sand on the far distance, that is where you start from) and it is the one most tourists swim in. However, the better scenery is a rock climb behind me from where I stood to take this picture.

Here is the other lava pools of Secret beach. You can see the surf is in the process of flushing out the farthest pool. The large boulders in these pools are smooth from all the banging about they experience during the harsh winter surf that pounds this area.

More of the geological 'stained glass' imagery of Kauai. This hole in the wall is at the end of a 50 Ft channel that opens into the ocean behind me. As you stand here, occasionally waves that happen to be perfectly aligned with the channel opening rush down the narrow waterway and smack into the hole carving out a cavern beyond. The collision ends with a deep resonating thunderclap that you can feel in your chest cavity.

The unofficial colors of Kauai - red, black and sea green.

In colors as vivid as the stained glass windows of the church, green algae and red soil contrast against the black lava rocks.

Here is the amazing area just past the Secret beach lava pools - its more lava pools but also with a waterfall! The pool in the foreground is our favorite swim hole. The waterfall is beautiful but the rocks are slippery and it is very challenging to move about there.

We were not originally planning on swiming so we did not have swim trunks. Undaunted, Phil skinny dipped in the lava pool braving the risk of wrasses or other native fish nipping at his worm.