Winter Beach Time

 Being at home for a few days, we take advantage of the sunshine and ride out to check on the beach.

You can see how crowded out there it is at this time of the year!  We were the only ones there as far as we could see.

One advantage of going when no one else is there is that you have a much better chance of finding good shells. After all, the first one there is the one who gets them.

People ask us, “What’s it like to live on Ocracoke in the winter?”  Every time of the year is different and wonderful.  We love these quiet times, but, we will soon be ready for the island to start waking up for the spring and summer seasons.

St. Simon’s Island

 This past weekend Trish and I were at the Ninth St. Simon’s Island Storytelling Festival on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia.

Held at the beautiful Epworth By The Sea Methodist Center, the place itself makes this lovely festival worth attending. You can both stay and dine at the Center for the entire festival.

Andy Offutt Irwin has been the creative impetus and sustainer of this festival from the beginning.  After the COVID hiatus, the audience has returned in growing numbers.  This is one of those audiences for whom it is a joy to tell.  They are supportive and responsive in every way.

This year I got to work with Megan Hicks, Paul Strickland, and Kim Whitecamp with Andy as the emcee.  It was a great lineup of tellers, all of whom did excellent work.  We all had a great time working together.

Always held on Presidents’ Day Weekend, this is a festival to put on your “must go” list.

Punchbowl Cemetery

 This afternoon we fly from Honolulu back to Atlanta.  Since the flight leaves in the afternoon and arrives tomorrow morning, we were in no hurry getting to the airport.  This gave us time to visit the National Veterans Memorial of the Pacific, commonly called the Punchbowl Cemetery.

The Cemetery was established by act of congress in 1949 and, since then, more than 53,000 veterans of WW II, Korea, and Vietnam are buried there. Close family members as well as veterans themselves can also be buried in the multi-level gravesites.

White the grave plots are almost all filled with at least one set of remains, later dying family members are still being buried here frequently. There are also new structures for cremains in multiple columbaria.

In addition to graves and cremains, there are numerous memorials for missing and deceased veterans.  There are memorial listings of more than 18,000 missing veterans from the WW II Pacific action and over 8,000 missing from Korea and 2,500 from Vietnam.

Down in the Punchbowl you see only the cemetery, but, from the top edge you can look down on all of Honolulu.  Trish and I were very moved by our visit here, our last stop on our Hawaiian vacation.

Around Kauai

 This is our last full day on the island of Kauai. We have had a wonderful time seeing things so warm and green in the midst of our winter at home.  

The staple starch in the traditional diet here is poi, made from the roots of the taro plant.  The taro is related to the elephant ear plant and is farmed, like rice, with its feet in the water.  The great green fields are very beautiful in themselves. Hanalea Valley, nearby, is a great farmland for taro.

Yesterday we went in a ride to the other side of the island.  While not as green as the very wet North Coast (we are told that the mountains above here easily get 500 inches of rain in a year), the rivers born in the mountains still send them waterfalls.  We stopped at two of them.

Back at our little house today for sun on the beach and rest on the lanai.  This has been a perfect vacation time for winter.

Luau Plus!

 Yesterday we went to the Smith Family Boat Ride and Luau for the afternoon and evening.

In 1946, the grandfather of the current adult generation started the Fern Grotto boat ride with an outboard that held four people.  Today the family continues this tradition with the large tour boats and the addition of beautiful gardens and an evening luau.

After our boat ride up the river, we walked to the Fern Grotto.  We were told that 2,500 weddings have been held here since 1946. 

We returned to the beautiful gardens where we had time until the pig was brought out of the underground cooking pit before the dinner started.

In the meantime we got bird food and enjoyed playing with the variety of friendly begging birds in the garden.

After the huge luau dinner, there was a show to end the evening.  It ranged from dancers to fire show and ended with rain starting just at the conclusion!  A soft end to a relaxing day.

Kilauea Lighthouse

 Our Ocracoke lighthouse is this year 200 years old.  We are proud that it is the oldest functioning lighthouse in the US.  In 1854 it was fitted with a very early Fresnel lens, developed by French physicist Augustine Fresnel about the time our lighthouse was built.  Ours is a Fourth Order Fresnel Lens that pushes the light out until it is visible fourteen miles at sea.  Our Fourth Order Lens is about two feet tall.

Yesterday Trish and I got to visit the remarkable Kilauea Lighthouse on the eastern shore of Kauai. 

This lighthouse is not very tall. It does not need to be as it sits on a high rocky outcrop that is already perched far above the ocean.

The most remarkable thing about this lighthouse, built in 1913, is that it has a very rare Second Order Fresnel Lens.  The lens itself stands just over six feet tall and weighs 8,000 pounds.  This Second Order Lens pushes what was historically an oil flame into visibility for twenty-four miles out at sea. It is a beautiful piece of work.

Now electrified, the light, which has a mechanism making it appear to rotate or flash, originally had to be manually crank-wound every three and a half hours.  

Being a lighthouse keeper was a very full time job. Carrying lamp oil, adjusting flues for wind and weather, keeping the burner clean and non-stop functional, cleaning the lens, maintaining the structure itself, winding and maintaining the rotation mechanism, this was not a passive job.  

The lives saved by the world’s lighthouses is a number impossible to estimate and much of that success is due to Augustine Fresnel.  He died of tuberculosis at age thirty-nine in 1827.

To Kauai

 Yesterday we flew from Moloka’i up to Kauai for the rest of our vacation.  We rented a little house right on the ocean on the north shore at Princeville.

It is a quirky little old house with one bedroom and a front lawn that runs right out to the beach.  Trish and I think it is the perfect place to disappear from the world for a few days.  

We sleep late, have coffee and hot chocolate and cereal in bed, then read for a while on the lanai, then walk on the beach, then go out for early supper so we can go to bed and read until we are asleep and start it all over again.  As soon as we get back, we are in a nonstop spring schedule, so, we treasure this time.

We have internet here but no phone service, so, we get to be in charge of the outside world.  You should give it a try!

Last Day on Moloka’i

 Today was our last day on Moloka’i, so, we headed out to check on the things we had not seen.  Our first adventure was at the Moloka’i Museum and Sugar Mill.

Sugar cane was once one of the main ventures on the island, but it has not been practiced on a large scale since the 1930s. This is the single remaining mill on the island.  It was restored in the 1980s and shows each step in the cane sugar derivation process.

Starting with the horse drawn cane mill, used to extract sap from the sugar cane, I felt that I was looking at a giant version of my granddaddy’s sorghum molasses operation.  All of the early steps in the process were the same, they were just using sugar cane instead of sorghum cane.

Once inside the mill itself, the long cooker was exactly like granddaddy’s cooker, except that it was about four times as large.  The process, though, of gradually heating up the sap and cooking it down as it moved along the long cooker was the same.  I remembered all the times I helped as a child.

The difference came after the cooking process.

Since the goal of this process was not cane syrup but cane sugar, these two huge steam powered centrifuges were used.  They spun the sugar out of the syrup and what was left was their version of  “molasses.”  It was very interesting.

Afterwards we went to a Macadamia nut farm.  We learned all about the Macadamia trees, native to Australia, that constantly bloom and bear ten months of the year.

The nuts are not picked. They fall off the tree and are raked up every day.  Then the nuts are dried in the sun for several weeks until the shell hardens and they are ready to shell.

We got to do everything from picking to cracking to shelling then to eating!  It was all fun.

Tomorrow we leave Moloka’i and fly up to Kauai for our final week here.

Our Moloka’i Home

 Where to stay on Moloka’i?  There is one hotel on the island. There are only a small number of places to eat and they have very limited menus.  So, instead of the hotel, Trish and I needed a place with a kitchen so we could fix most of our meals. 

We found, on the extreme western end of the island, a small group of condos, some of which are available to rent. So, that is where we are.

We have had high winds since being here, so, even with the temperatures in the seventies, it has not been beach weather. We take walks, though, and enjoy the beauty of the scenery.

Being right on the ocean, this is a beautiful place to walk.

The high winds are giving us gigantic waves that create a sort of moving art work that is almost hypnotic.  We saw one lone surfer far out in the water, but, we never saw him get up and ride a wave. What he was waiting for never came.

We are also fascinated by the plant life. There are many banyan trees and lots of Norfolk Island pines and even sheffleras taller than the buildings.  It is all interesting.

We came here for a break from our normal and we are certainly getting that!

Exploring Moloka’i

 Yesterday we spent the day exploring the island of Moloka’i.  

We drove the coast-hugging narrow road all the way to the other end of the island.

In the way we passed the two remaining churches of the seven built on the island by Father Damien during his sixteen years on the island.  Though his work was with the isolated leper colony across the mountains on the north shore of the island, he made sure that all of the islanders had access to a place of worship.  These two are still functional.

The narrow road had little pull-off places so you could get past any vehicle that happened to be coming the other way.  Several times we had to wiggle our way past pickups and cars.

Across the channel we could see the south end of the island of Oahu.  We kept imagining what Oahu was like when it was as unsettled as Moloka’i.  It is clear that people here do not want this island to be developed.  We even saw one hand-made roadside sign that said, “Aloha does not mean that you can move here!”  We, though, have found the people very welcoming.

We ended our day having dinner at the one hotel on the island, the Hotel Moloka’i.  We ate right at the edge of the water watching the sunset.  It was a beautiful overall day.

To Moloka’i

 Today we left Honolulu and took a short 41 minute flight to the little island of Moloka’i where we will be until the middle of next week.

Trish and I were originally planning to spend this time on Maui, but after the fires decimated Lahaina we decided to let that place heal a little more before traveling there.

I have long wanted to visit Moloka’i, largely known from the leper colony that once was here on a small peninsula on the north side of the island.  The colony became famous through the movie version of the life of Father Damien, the priest who dedicated his life to service with the lepers.  We will not be going there as you have to ride mules down 1,700 feet of cliffs and I am not a fan of heights!

The real adventure of the day was the flight itself.  Mokulele Airlines flies Cessna Caravans over from Honolulu and it is like a little tour in itself to make the flight.  We looked down at exactly where we had spent the week and could easily spot our hotel in Waikiki.

The view of the Punchbowl Crater was perfect from our flight pattern.  You don’t get this perspective on the ground! You can also see the ending of a spectacular rainbow that arched over all of Honolulu as we flew away.

We are here and settled now. Tomorrow we will set out to explore this little island, thirty eight miles long by ten miles wide, and make our plans for the rest of our time here.