63 Days of Baby Strads: Waimea Canyon and JoJo's Shave Ice

On Monday we took a drive to the South West side of the island to check out Waimea Canyon, or the Grand Canyon of the Pacific, which is part of an extensive state park and looks over the inaccessible (except by helicopter, boat, or 22 mile hike) Na Pali Coast.  It also offers a view of Ni'ihau, a privately owned island (70 square miles) bought from the King of Hawaii by Elizabeth Sinclair for $10,000 in 1864.  It's been passed down to her descendants, the Robinson Family, who are infamous here on Kauai.  It's a 40-mile round trip through the Canyon and a 4,000 foot increase in elevation.  It took us about four hours to go up and come back down.  The trip was gorgeous and we made a lot of stops along the way, including lunch at a tiny little restaurant (we found out later that the restaurant had been shut down a couple of times for high levels of lead in their water...our poor kid, I drank a lot of water to get that chili down.)  There were some amazing views along the way.  I've posted a view of best pics, but again, to have the complete experience flip through the slideshow.

After the arduous drive up the mountain and  with me feeling sick from the smell of burning breaks on the way down, we decided to stop for a Hawaiian treat, Shave Ice.  For those of you who, like me, believed that all shave ice (basically, a snow cone) is all the same, let me tell you, you have been fooled.  Hawaiian Shaved Ice, especially the gourmet stuff you get at a little shack in Waimea called JoJo's, is craving inducing, and it's not just because I'm pregnant.  Jonathan dreams of the crispy, syrupy ice, mixed with creamy macadamia nut ice cream too.  It's sweet, it's creamy, it's flavored with exotic fruit syrups of vibrantly beautiful colors.  I can't get enough.  

Finally, after we finished our shave ice, contented and happy with the sugary goodness that was flowing through our veins, including Baby Boy Strads, who would casually twist and turn to demonstrate his approval, we drove to Poipu to check out a lava rock blow hole called the Spouting Horn.  We timed it perfectly because it was also sunset.