Wednesday, Mar 12, 2008

LIGHTHOUSE

Yesterday Chelsea and I got a late start, which I think I mentioned yesterday, but it was just as well because...there's basically one road on this island which goes almost all the way around except for an area on the northwest where the terrain is too swampy and they never persued putting in a road. So once you've traveled the road around the island, you've pretty much seen it all. That's not to mention all the hiking areas and little side trips--none of which we were interested in doing.

It's really beautiful here though, a lot like riding around New England except with differen foliage. We discovered that there are three lighthouses on Kauai, so before we headed to the north shore, we tried to locate the two in the southeastern area. We found them okay, but they are just towers with lights on them and we couldn't get very close to them anyway.

So we headed north--we were going to go to the end of the road where there was supposed to be an awesome lookout. On the way we digressed to the lighthouse just to get an idea of where it is and what we could expect at sundown. There is a lookout to see the lighthouse from a really nice perspective, but the path to the lighthouse is only open from 10-4. It's a good thing we stopped when we did, we took the road to the entrance and were able to get right up close, but naturally there were all kinds of people walking around.

The image below is an experiment with my lensbaby. Makes most of the image out of focus with one small spot (hopefully) in focus. Kind of a fun lens to use, but pretty tricky.

The shot below is from the lighthouse area looking off to the side along the coast obviously. Really beautiful, but pretty voggy again.

We decided to head up the road to see the overlookand then come back at sunset for the lighthouse. Along the way, in order to use up some more time, we stopped at a small "mall" area--specialty shops and some eating establishments. We had lunch and then walked around for about 20 minutes, which is all it took. I was blown away by the prices of the products... a little too upscale for me. But in our walk we came across this bird. We waited and waited for it to come back down on it's perch, but it seemed compelled to hang unside down and chew on a metal chain, so this is the best I could get. Beautiful bird.

So, it was finally time to head back to the lighthouse for sunset. It was well worth it and it's a good thing we got there when we did. The sun was great for a while, then went behind a bank of clouds and the light became very dull. I'm really happy with this image.

When the light got bad and we could tell it wouldn't improve, we headed back to the motel. We were both beat by then anyway. It was a good day.

Aloha