Jason and I had a trip booked with Jason’s parents to a Caribbean Island for June of 2020. This was supposed to be a thank you to them for raising that rascal. Because of COVID, our original plans got canceled. A year later, those arrangements were still pointless as the country we had intended on visiting was not accepting travelers due to continued flareups. Last fall, we determined that taking a trip somewhere was better than continuing to wait, and as traveling internationally was unreliable, we settled on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, the only standard Hawaiian island Jason and I had never visited.
One benefit of jet lag is beholding brilliant sunrises.As a photographer, one makes sacrifices.
Part of the appeal of traveling is seeing the world from different perspectives. While it is impossible to understand the heart and guts of any location during a brief stay, a tourist’s observations and experiences should ideally at least shift their viewpoint groove. Therefore, I was thrilled by how many different perspectives we acquired on Kauai, and that’s what, as you might guess, this post and its upcoming continuations are all about.
The lithified sand dunes on Kauai’s southern coast were under the sea some 125,000 years ago.A lava rock covered in sea slime made a worthy opponent for Jason’s calf.
The Wind’s Perspective
Our first morning on Kauai, Jason and I went on a hike down the Maha’ulepa Heritage Trail. The Maha’ulepa Trail roams through lithified sand dunes worn by wind, salt, and sea into strange caverns and figures that line the shore. Just past Shipwreck Beach and Makawehi Point, only 15 minutes down the coast, Jason tore up his leg and foot on some lava rocks near a tide pool we had stopped to investigate. We had to return to our hotel before his savage wounds consumed him.
This spilling ensemble fed by Mount Wai’ale’ale is called the Five Sisters.Each of Waimea Canyon’s many layers represents a different volcanic eruption.It’s rumored that Kauai contains almost 10,000 waterfalls. Hanalei Bay is the biggest bay on Kauai’s north shore.The slender sea cliffs of the Na Pali Coast rise up to 3,000 feet above the ocean.
Later that afternoon, we took a doors-off helicopter tour with Jack Harter Helicopters. In a tiny MD Hughes 500, we zipped 100-120 mph about 1,000 feet above the ground and over 2,000 feet above the water. We traversed the whole island including much terrain wild and inaccessible by foot. Having a lack of machinery between our bodies and the lush landscape far beneath us wasn’t as terrifying as I thought, but, then again, due to my short stature, I was forced to take the Captain Kirk seat. This remarkable ride ended up being everyone’s favorite piece of our whole trip, and I would highly recommend splurging on a helicopter tour if you find yourself on Kauai.
The cathedrals of the Na Pali Coast are more impressive than any of human construction.Mount Wai’ale’ale gets about 430 inches of rain a year making it one of the wettest spots on Earth and a prolific waterfall generator.The Wall of Tears or Weeping Wall constantly flows with Mount Wai’ale’ale’s surplus.We’ve done helicopter tours on three Hawaiian islands, but I think this one was our favorite.
Running can’t replace sleep. It’s not an equivalent exchange. Jason and I tested that law again last fall on the Bonneville Salt Flats while partaking in the Dusk to Dawn Relay. Yup, they still can’t be swapped. How was our second experience the same and different from our first Salt Flats all-nighter?
Cots, full coolers, lounge chairs, and snacks galore- what a luxurious encampment!
Jason and I were more ambitious with our team size this time. Signing up for a six-person team rather than an eight-person meant a greater commitment to laps. Others seemed less committed though, and we didn’t have a full crew for our Na Squad until six weeks before the race. We eventually attracted an incongruous but genial assortment of teammates ranging from teenagers to senior citizens and from ramblers to sprinting veterans. Other crews may have come upon their participants easier for the number of total runners appeared to have doubled from the race’s inaugural year.
The Bonneville Salt Flats are 12 miles long and five miles wide.Unnecessary jumping is the perfect way to waste energy before pulling an all-nighter.
The race loop was exactly two miles long this time. Between 8:04 p.m. and 7:06 a.m., the duration of the event, Jason and I both ran six laps. The total miles of our associates varied from eight to fourteen. One of our teenage teammates simultaneously “pulled a muscle” and “got a blister” in the middle of the night making him unable to circle further. Yeah, basically he didn’t want to run anymore. I was certainly not our fastest runner, but I was unfailingly consistent with no “pulled muscles.” I completed all but one of my laps between 19 and 21 minutes.
Thanks Stacey Marble for the cool silhouette shot.
Our team again broke up responsibility for chunks of the night to pairs, so sleep was still technically feasible, at least on a small-scale. For the second time, Jason and I took the slot no one wanted, which was the two-hour block between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. All our teammates snoozed during these hours. We didn’t mind the quiet until we tried to wake up a replacement at the end of our window. No one was particularly interested, and it took a lot of effort to get our next looper in place.
As its name suggests, Dusk to Dawn starts promptly at sunset.
How did our team do? We placed 3rd amongst the six-person teams, but there were only four of those. Out of the 15 total teams in all three divisions, we came in 7th. Robust averageness? That’s what we are all about baby! We finished five laps behind our division winners. During our first attempt of this relay, our eight-person team completed 59.85 miles. We were hoping to beat that number in 2021. With 64 miles, we did it!
Speeds varied considerably amongst out teammates, but we always had someone at the start line ready to continue our forward momentum.
How was the setting? Besides the company with you, the spaces above you are the best thing about this race. Again, we saw Saturn and Jupiter and a million glimmering jabs. The moon was an enflamed sliver that appeared just an hour or so before sunrise. The sunrise itself was a bit disappointing, far from the vibrant, multicolored marvel we witness on our first Dusk to Dawn. Perhaps this was the doing of the pervasive wildfire smoke, or perhaps we just lucked out last time with a rise above standard.
That’s a smile of success or at least of completion. Thanks Stacey Marble.
Just how flat were the Bonneville Salt Flats? The salt was more compact this time, less like a Slurpee and more like packed dirt. That meant the difference between salt making its way inexplicably into every cranny and it remaining mostly where it should. It was colder on this occasion. At two points in the night, I got so chilled my body decided it was quitting the warmth game. Thanks to blankets, three jackets, and intermittent running I survived anyway.
No sleep and all salt makes Jack a brisk boy.
There is something magical about running by yourself on a curious bleached plain with only the crunch of your tennis shoes against the salt to interrupt your contemplation of the innumerable flickering stars webbing the blackness above you. That stillness is only heightened by its contrast to the lively sounds surrounding the start line. Not everyone in our group immediately praised the enchanting perks of this relay though. One of the teenagers complained that we had misrepresented this race to him. Apparently, he didn’t think it would involve so much running. Hmm… what else might be the primary focus of an 11-hour race? Jason and I expected a lot of laughs, a lot of salt, a lot of steps, and not a whole lot of sleep. Our expectations became reality; that was an equivalent exchange.
For his Christmas present in 2019, I gave Jason a trip to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in San Francisco. Tickets were bought, reservations were made, and we were supposed to travel during the last half of March 2020. It didn’t happen. I’ll give you three guesses why not. Since then, our performance of this production has been rescheduled a number of times. None of those reschedulings have resulted in any viewings of the show since the pandemic has stubbornly refused to retreat on anyone’s timeline. Those reschedulings did result in us having plane tickets and hotel reservations last July without a musical to see. We decided to go to San Francisco anyway as it was in the initial stages of opening up “after COVID.” As we all know, this turned out to be a “between” not an “after.” Yes, we all are aware of what happened next in COVID’s story. Here’s what happened in ours.
Pan American Unity, Diego Rivera’s largest portable mural, was being restored at the SFMOMA when we visited.Anselm Kiefer’s works utilize straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac.
After years of traveling with Jason quite regularly, I had procedures and lists for packing for flights, but after 18 months of no air travel, I had largely forgotten them. That made preparing more time consuming. It felt strange to board an aircraft again, and masks made the experience even more odd, not to mention stuffy.
The Sutro Baths closed in 1966 and burned down just months later under somewhat suspect circumstances.Oxidizing metal, crumbling concrete, and mossy pools are all that remain of the once-massive Sutro Baths.
As soon as we got to San Francisco, we set about undertaking the most important component of any trip, eating delicious food. We walked down the street to Bouche, a highly rated French restaurant. The waiter told us we picked an excellent time to come to San Francisco as all the restaurants that were normally impossible to get into were much more available thanks to the lack of tourists. We made our reservation for Bouche as we were walking over, so his opinion checked out.
The Coastal Trail winds by craggy seascapes and warped cypress trees worlds away from the nearby city.Mile Rock Beach was breathtakingly picturesque and breathtakingly turbulent.
Amongst the premier 20th-century art museums in the country, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was too close to our hotel for us to miss. Therefore, the next morning we walked over to experience some contemporary culture. I was expecting to find works by Ansel Adams, Pollock, Warhol, Dorothea Lange, and Matisse. Instead, somehow, we missed those entirely and found compositions that surprised and absorbed us by artists previously unfamiliar. Anselm Kiefer’s canvases, straw and paint aggressively taking 3D form in dark motifs, were my favorite stumbling discovery. Colorful works by Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Mayhew, Gerhard Richter, Tony Cragg, Jannis Kounellis, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Georg Baselitz, and Sigmar Polke also enthralled us gallery after gallery. Yup, I just dropped a bunch of names and now I’m going to pretend I knew who they all were before our visit to the SFMOMA. Sure, yeah, I totally did.
The Japanese Tea Garden contains the largest bronze Buddha outside Asia.
After the museum closed and our brains had been stuffed over their fill lines with shades, contours, shapes, and spaces, we had enough time to take a walk along the Coastal Trail in the Land’s End region of Golden Gate National Recreation Area before dark. Our stroll started at the skeleton of the Sutro Baths, an engineering marvel built in the late 1800s that once held 1.7 million gallons of seawater and could accommodate 10,000 people in seven pools of different temperature. Partly due to the distraction of those remains, we didn’t get as far down this path as our desires could have taken us. However, we did make it to Mile Rock Beach, an isolated and extremely windy cove with beautiful views of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was gorgeous and so gusty I had to don a four coat and jacket combo.
In the Zen Garden, bonsai and azaleas complement the currents of a stone river.The Drum Bridge forms a circle when its reflection is viewed from the top. It was imported from Japan in 1894.
The next day did not go exactly as planned because the museum we were planning on visiting was still struggling to shift into semi-open mode. So instead, we went to the farmers market at the Ferry Building and also did some shopping and tasting in its quaint boutiques. Macarons, empanadas, lattes, pan dulce, bunuelos, and farm fresh blackberries and peaches all made it into our bellies… yeah, we pretty much just spent hours intaking.
The Temple Gate was originally a temporary structure erected for the Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915.
In the afternoon, we went to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park, the oldest public Japanese garden in America. We visited the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego a couple years ago. How did this compare? San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden is immaculately pruned and harmoniously designed. Its trees and plants are much more established than those at the Japanese Friendship Garden due to the difference in the ages of the gardens. (A large portion of San Diego’s garden was rebuilt between the 90s and 2015.) However, the Tea Garden is much smaller, less than half the size of San Diego’s. That wasn’t a big deal to us, but the crowds were another matter. When I think of a Japanese garden, I think of the peaceful contemplation of nature in a serene setting. (Yes, it’s possible this notion is based on pop culture references rather than cultural realities.) I don’t think of throngs taking pictures and exploring rowdily. The Tea Garden was packed, and that kind of ruined my calm moments. The people didn’t stop us from continuing our eclectic and copious food intake pattern though with a green tea cheesecake and some edamame from the Tea House.
Rustic Bridge, one of Stow Lake’s two bridges, was built from local chert stones.The Chinese Pavilion on Stow Lake was a gift to San Francisco from Taipei. It arrived as 6,000 pieces that had to be assembled.
We did find tranquility afterward just down the path at Stow Lake, which is also in Golden Gate Park. Although manmade, this lake predates the turn of the 20th century and gives no hint of its fabricated origin. As the park’s largest body of water, it took us an hour to loop the paths around its shores and island, Strawberry Hill. Its Chinese Pavilion proved a much more suitable place for quiet contemplation than the Japanese Tea Garden.
Next week, the second half of our San Francisco adventure will be revealed. Aparecium!
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