Today we went to Flippin to get Dawson. You can see pictures of him walking to the house from the shop where my parents dogs live and then he saw us and started running to us. He was so glad to be back with us! It's good to have him home. Scott gave him a bath tonight and he's all clean and happy now.
Scott and I have spent all day today just relaxing at the pool and beach and enjoying our last full day in Hawaii 
We spent the most part of our day on the most beautiful beach ever formed. We had the best time. We stopped at a grocery store and got sandwiches and took a cooler with our picnic lunch and drinks and there was hardly anyone on this beach. The waves are so strong it's not safe for swimming or surfing. But we didn't want to swim out far anyway. It was a LOVELY day with great weather. Just the best day.
Then we drove to Lihue and ate at Duke's Canoe Club. It was very good. We both had steaks and they also had hula pie. We had this in Maui and it was so good we had to have it again. Then of course like good Bentonville residents - we had to go to Wal-Mart. ha! We actually needed a few things and I wanted to check out power tools and floor care. :-)
Today is our last full day and we are sad. I tried to talk my parents into shipping Dawson over here so we could just live.
Yesterday we finally had good weather so we drove over to the north side of the island (after eating breakfast). We stopped at all the beaches on that side. Up to this point we were tossed up on whether we liked Maui or Kauai better but we know for sure now. Kauai is the most beautiful place we have ever been. I'm going to post several pictures today. We found the most awesome beach we have ever seen. We plan on spending most of the day there today. It's unbelievable. We drove as far as we could go on the island and then came back. We stopped and ate lunch at Tropical Taco. Then we came back to the hotel in the afternoon and spent a little time just relaxing by the pool. Last night we drove to Kapa'a - a town about 20 miles away and ate at a japenese steakhouse. It was good but I think we prefer Shogun. I missed Shogun's salad - at this place instead you get a bowl of pickles, salad shrimp and imitation crab meat. huh? We then went to cold stone creamery for ice cream and Scott got coffee at starbucks and then we came back and watched the American Idol finals. We couldn't resist. ha! I still think Chris should have won but Taylor would be my next pick.
The picture of the building is our hotel. And the red jeep is our car. See all the chickens/roosters. Thousands of them live on the island and they just roam all around everywhere. Everytime we are on the beach or eating - there are roosters right near us. It's a little scary. And they crow CONSTANTLY. We have been sleeping the with the windows open every night so we can hear the ocean plus it's very cool at night but the roosters always wake us up.
Have a great day!
We ate breakfast early once again and then headed out to tour the island. Our first stop was at the Kilauea Lighthouse (see pic). This is the northern most part of Hawaii. We met an older couple from Alabama there. It was nice to meet up with some southerners. They saw Scott's razorback visor and immediately wanted to talk football. They even knew about Mitch Mustain. We talked to them for a long while. We left there and next stopped at the coconut marketplace in Kapaa. We got a shaved ice. That is a big deal on kauai and it has ice cream on the bottom and is huge. (see pic). (Laurie - you would have LOVED it!)
It started to rain then. (our day had constant weather changes). So we had to put the top on the jeep and we continued driving until we reached Kalaheo on the south side of the island. We ate at Brick oven pizza which came recommended in our guidebook and it was VERY good as you can see. We then drove up to the Waimea Canyon. This is the grand canyon of the pacific. We had to drive up a mountain - it's 4000 ft up. We went from 85 degrees and sunny to 65 and cold and rainy. Crazy. The view was spectacular. Our pictures can't do it justice.
The south side of the island is where they raise sugar. There are fields and fields of sugar cane and a sugar mill. You can see the picture of where they have harvested some of the sugar.
We came down and began to drive back towards the northside and our hotel. It's about an hr and a half drive. We then had dinner in our hotel and it was wonderful. We sat outside and it's so cool at night and there was candlelight. Very romantic!
We have decided we either need to retire here or at least buy a second house one day and spend a lot of our time here. We love it. Except all the locals seem to be very earthy hippies and I'm pretty sure they are all smoking pot or at least growing pot. Hitchhiking and vetetarian restaurants are very common here also. And there are tons of churches but very odd churches - like hindu temples and "dharma churches". I've only seen one Baptist church. I'm not sure we would fit in as locals but we would sure like to try.
We woke up at 4 this morning (since it was 9 our time) but tried to go back to sleep. We got up at 6 (yes on vacation) and got ready and went to Scott's favorite part of the day - breakfast. They have an incredible breakfast buffet here. I got papaya yogurt and Scott had several plates of everything. ha! Then we went to the grocery store and loaded up on drinks and snacks. We also got our lunch there. Scott got a sandwich and I got delicious sushi. We came back and attempted to lay out. It was pretty cloudy and a little rainy all day. At 3 it finally was raining pretty hard so we got in the car and drove around the north side of the island. There are a million one lane bridges but it was such a pretty drive. We stopped at K'ee beach - this is where they filmed South Pacific. It was beautiful and it stopped raining long enough for us to take pictures. There was also a cave across the street where water used to be. It was neat.
Last night we ate at a nearby restaurant called the Bali Hai. It was supposed to be the "most romantic restaurant in Hawaii." It was very beautiful - open looking at the mountain and all candle light. The food wasn't that great. We both got steaks and as Scott said "this is a little western sizzleish". ha! Not that we don't like western sizzlin but for the price we were paying - we expected a little more. We did get a good dessert! We were exhausted and went to bed early. Our first full day in kauai was wonderful - despite the rain! (Forecast is sunny the rest of the week)!
