February 17 - We're booked.

     Another day, another try to get our internet work finished.  We drove back down to Waimea.  This time, the library was open, and we successfully got all our bookings taken care of.  While Diana was doing that, I paged through a Lonely Planet Indonesia book and got excited about the total eclipse there on March 9, 2016.  I think I know where we'll be spending next winter.
     We hoped to get a hike in before dark, so we drove back up the mountain and parked at the trailhead for the Awa'awapuhi Trail. It's 6.2 miles roundtrip with a 1600 ft elevation drop to the overlook.  We didn't start until 3 pm and weren't sure we could make it before our 6:30 darkness cutoff.  But we decided to push hard, because the view at the end was supposed to be quite nice.
    We made it to out to the overlook in an hour and ten minutes.

 It was worth the hike.  I scarf down some peanuts while enjoying the view, since we hadn't had time for lunch.

"Hey brah, how 'bout sending a little aloha my way?"

 We heard, but did not see, goats on these slopes. 

 Ko'ae Kea (White-tailed tropic bird) soaring along the Na Pali coast, and sharing airspace with ...

     ... helicopters ferrying tourists in and out of the narrow valleys.

     We had a bit of climb ahead of us before returning to the car, so Diana catches a few winks.  After hanging around the overlook for half an hour we set a punishing pace back, partly because I had a a pasta meal planned and hoped to have enough time to prepare it before it got too late, but mostly just to see how quickly we could do.  We made it in and hour and twenty-two minutes.  Tired me out, and it would have taken a lot longer if the trail had been wet.  But the sun was still up when we got back to the car, and we felt pretty good about ourselves.
    That night, after dinner, we met a couple born on Kauai with a seven year old son.  Brigit works at a dude ranch on the north shore, and she told us her husband Goff drives all day for a living.  Drives?  How much driving can you do on a little island like Kauai.  Turns out, he was an Army helicopter pilot in Afghanistan for two years.  Now he flies tourists around Kauai - eight flights a day that each last 50 minutes, with a 10 minute break in between.  He told us it can be tiring - flying the 'copter, providing the narration, and making sure everyone is happy.  He said he flies a lot more here than he ever did in the Army.  We talked around a campfire for a couple hours, getting a local point of view about Hawaiian chickens, pig hunting (although they don't), the culture divides on Kauai and between the islands, and whatever else you talk about while drinking intoxicating beverages.