Day 15: Last full day- soaking it all up

And just like that, two weeks after the whole whirlwind of Asher’s Thursday night graduation and then boarding a plane Friday morning, here we were, somehow waking up to our last full day in Kauai! Hard to believe.

Two weeks generally feels like my sweet spot for travel. By Friday, I didn’t feel like I wanted to go home, but I also felt content with the time we’d had and had just a touch of that, “Ahh, this was wonderful, but it will also be nice to get home and back to my regular routines” feeling.

It always takes me a few days in the beginning just to acclimate and settle in and start to feel relaxed, so a week goes by way too fast. By the time I start to feel like I’m really on vacation, it’s almost over! But I also don’t want to ever end a trip feeling like, “Take me home!!!” either. You know? So 2 weeks always seems just right.

(I am sure this “sweet spot” varies wildly for everyone. Also, I’m not sure if maybe it’s a mental thing- like if I know the trip is ending at 2 weeks, I’ll naturally mentally start transitioning to the “time to go home” feels right before it ends. Maybe if I had a 3 week trip, perhaps that would still wait to happen until just a day or two before the trip ended. Who knows. (I’ll likely never know that, because I wouldn’t want to burn SO much PTO all at once! Or, probably, pay for a 3 week trip. 2 weeks is bad enough…))

Anyway, what to do on our last day?!?

There certainly were more things to do on Kauai that we hadn’t done yet. But in fairness, many of the remaining things were pretty similar to things we had basically already done, just different ones. (Hikes, waterfalls, beaches, etc.)

We briefly entertained hiking to this one pair of waterfalls that looked really cool, with a rope swing and jumping options (always popular with the boys 🙂 ). But it required a bit of a drive, and although the boys had been very enthused about the idea originally a few days before, we all kind of decided, Eh. We didn’t want to drive. And realistically, we’d seen a bunch of waterfalls already. And jumped off stuff.

What sounded the best to all of us was mostly just taking a relaxing day to sort of soak up the last bit of vacation vibes.

For some reason, I woke up at like, 4:55 a.m. I was laying there awake, trying to go back to sleep (I hadn’t gone to bed early so probably could use the sleep….). But I had an inkling that I wasn’t going to fall asleep anyway. Did I really want to spend the next hour+ on my last day laying in the dark condo bedroom, awake? No.

So I got up and enjoyed a LUXURIOUSLY quiet and peaceful morning on the balcony in perfect solitude with several cups of tea.

It was wonderful. The birds were going nuts. Eventually the roosters joined in. It was a warm balmy morning. Loved it!! I worked on a blog post. 🙂

Eventually later that morning we all went to the pool and hot tub. We ended up spending several hours there! It was great.

But then the sun came out and I even ended up swimming in the pool! For a really long time! The water was warm and felt so good and it was really fun. Ethan ran back to get all the snorkeling goggles, lol, and we were racing, doing handstands, doing somersaults… I felt like I was 12 and swimming with my sister on vacation again. Hahaha. Asher even gave me butterfly lessons.

It made me think that maybe I should swim laps at the gym sometimes! Swimming underwater really feels so good, like you’re in another world or something under there. 🙂 And it’s nice and low impact and is such a great full body workout.

I didn’t want to get out, but eventually after a long while we decided we should probably move on if we still wanted to hit the beach, too.

After some lunch at the condo (eating up leftovers), we drove to the beach.

I personally wanted to go back to Hanalei Bay beach one more time (the beautiful one we went to on our first night, with the pier). But the boys really wanted to go back to their favorite, Kalihiwai Beach, where they had good luck with waves. Due to our extended pool time, we didn’t really have time to do both.

I conceded to the boys and we spent the afternoon at their favorite beach while the boys swam and the rest of us just relaxed.

A local couple was walking a few dogs (off leash) down the beach, and this little guy ran ahead and I guess decided he’d had enough walking and was hot and wanted to enjoy our umbrella. Haha! It was so funny. 🙂 Once his family caught up, they were like, What are you doing?! Haha. I guess he wanted to join our family instead. 😉

The weather was just a little iffy- actually, probably our worst weather day of the trip. But it still wasn’t really bad. Just partly cloudy for most of the time, until the end when it started to sprinkle progressively harder and harder.

Most of the time it was dry, although we kept getting wind gusts that would turn our umbrella inside out! Eventually we gave up and took the umbrella down, which was fine, because the sun kind of went behind the clouds around that time, anyway.

I read a bunch of my book. Tried to just relax relax relax… trying not to think about having to go back to work and reality very soon.

By late afternoon the weather turned into a bit of a bust with rain showers, so we packed it up. It was for the best anyway, since we had dinner plans and needed to shower, etc.

I had suggested that we go to Happy Talk on our last night, a restaurant I saw online before the trip that appeared to have really great views.

Well, the prior night when we went to the pizza place, we learned that it’s at the SAME resort as the pizza place (Hanalei Bay Resort)! It’s the pizza place on one side, Happy Talk on the other.

Oh well, the views were amazing, so I still wanted to go, even though we had “kind of” been there already. I mean, they are completely separate restaurants and menus and everything, just essentially same location. (Turns out the views are actually better and less obstructed from the pizza place!!)

Happy Talk doesn’t take reservations, and it’s not that big, so I was a little worried we’d have to wait a long time. We did have to wait maybe 30 minutes or so, but it was fine. I wanted to poke around the resort a little more and take some family pictures on their pretty grounds.

We had planned to try to “dress nicely” for our last night (i.e. how about we don’t go there straight from the beach this time…lol).

Luckily, the sun came out! All the heavier clouds from earlier blew away.

We put our name on the list and got some really nice family photos with their lush landscaping.

This place is sooooo pretty. It seems this is actually a condo-style resort, with many of them being owned privately. Like a timeshare kind of thing, I think? I believe you can still reserve directly for some units, and some may be rented on VRBO. I didn’t look into it that much. I think- though don’t quote me- that while the grounds are amazing, the condo units may be a little more dated, etc. So it shows up online as only a 3-star place. It’s also not beach front (though it’s nearby).

I don’t know, the pool looks incredible and the grounds we saw and restaurants were awesome, but I don’t really know any other details on this place except that it had amazing views!

Open green space where a dad with some kids was playing corn hole:

Sitting on a bench waiting for our table:

Love this pic of my mom and dad!

Anyway, you get the idea. It’s beautiful. 🙂

We got our table after 30-40 minutes. The views ARE beautiful from the restaurant, but they had pulled a shade screen thing down to prevent the lowering sun from blinding everyone. Which makes sense! But also kind of… ruined the view temporarily. lol.

There was great live music!

Here you can see the screen after the sun position shifted and they raised the screen back up:

We all agreed the view was a little better from neighboring Wiki Pizza, where we had a U-shaped table all looking right out at the view. I mean, this would be amazing if you were on one of the outside edge tables. But for our 6-top table, we had a partially obstructed view.

Still pretty awesome though!

I’m glad we got this beautiful view + live music for our last dinner of the trip! The food was good- similar menu to other places on the islands I’d say- but the “vibe” of the place was definitely what sold it for me.

The only thing that we didn’t care for here was that because we were a group of 6, they added an included 25% tip onto our bill. 25%? I mean, we are happy to tip and we always tip well. But I personally have never seen anything above 20% added as required gratuity. Our server was very nice and we would have been happy to tip her above and beyond, but being forced to tip 1/4 of the (expensive) bill seemed a little odd and excessive. Maybe this is common in other places, but I feel like we eat out a lot and have never seen 25% included before. 🤷‍♀️

Anyway, besides that rubbing us a bit wrong, it was a great last dinner!

Our flight the next day wasn’t until evening, so it was nice to not need to race back and get to bed for a super early flight or anything. I did end up doing most of my packing though, because we still had a few last-minute plans for the next morning.

Our VRBO hosts had granted us a late check out at noon instead of 10, so Ivan and I were planning to go back to Hanalei Bay beach with our coffee/ tea in the morning for a bit (the beach I wanted to return to but hadn’t had a chance yet).

More on our REAL last day later! 🙂