Honeymoon: Day 6

Day 6 was Saturday, hiking day! We woke up bright and early, put on our "hiking gear", and made our way south toward Waimea Canyon.

As you see on the map there are two roads that get you to the state park, and one road that takes you up the entire canyon. We took the road off Kekaha up first. I was having a bit of an anxiety attack at this point. The roads were super curvy and winding, and literally right against the side of the cliff. No bars or rails or nothing. It felt like Andy was going 50 mph (when he really was going 20-25).  I was certain we were going to drive right off a cliff. Once we met up with the other road by the state park it got better, and we stopped at our first lookout.

We had a book of trails with us which pointed out places off the road to go and hike. Before we went, I thought this wouldn't be a problem. But, since the roads were narrow and you just had to pull off the side of the road to find the trails, I really wasn't interested. The trails weren't marked so we were kind of clueless and ended up only stopping at the lookouts along the way (these all had official parking and were clearly labeled).

Then we made it to the very top, the end of the road. This place is called Wai'ale'ale (sometimes the Crater), and is known to be one of the wettest spots on Earth. I think if we ever go again we will go all the way to the top first thing before the fog sets in, and stop at the other lookouts on the way down. This lookout was connected to a trail of sorts that we decided to hike down. It was probably 20 ft. wide with cliffs on either side - CREEPY! I surprisingly did okay but I wondered how many people have fallen off. The views were really breathtaking.

The trail

On the way back up to the car, we decided to have a little jog/race. Wuff. The fact that we'd been sitting on our loins all week coupled with the fact that we were at a high altitude, we were wiped. Time to enjoy the ride back down. This time we took Waimea road so our views were a bit different..

We made it back to our hotel probably around noon. I think we just had PB sandwiches and headed to the pool to enjoy the sun of course. We got french fries and onion rings on the beach and just enjoyed the day. We had planned to go to Kilohana plantation for dinner and site seeing, but we realized later on that dinner there ended at 5:30 and we weren't going to make it. That's on our bucket list for the next trip! We ended up ordering salad and pizza and eating it on the beach. I think we got another round of gelato at a place at the strip, too. That night we enjoyed another swim and sat in the hot tub, starting to get sad that our trip was almost over..