Tubing the AOL Way

Next up: Kauai.  Perhaps best known as the shooting location for Jurassic Park, this island is small (the drive from ROC to Utica would take you right off the island) and not very populated (about twice as big as Brighton).  It is lush and very, very green--called the "Garden Isle," it rose out of the sea outside our room as dawn broke and the sky shifted from gold to blue.

We would be on Kauai for two days, and in planning what to do, taking a helicopter around the island seemed a no-brainer … for us and everyone else, so we grabbed seats when they were available: on our second day.  What to do on the first day?  I found an unusual tour option: tubing through the tunnels on an old sugar cane farm.  It, too, seemed to be quite popular.  Sign us up!

After another wonderful POA breakfast buffet, we walked a bit off the boat to the main drag to grab a cab to Kauai Backcountry Adventures.  One other thing I forgot to mention about Kauai: there are feral chickens everywhere.  Story is that they were brought over by the Polynesians for food and their numbers were increased by chickens who escaped their pens during Hurricane Iniki in 1992.  They are fearless.



Here's the backstory on the tubing adventure.  The guy who runs the company went to high school with Steve Case--yes, the "you've got mail" and AOL guy.  Case owns A LOT of land in Hawaii, so much that he's one of the state's top 10 land owners (side bar: it seems just a handful of people own most of the land in Hawaii, which is mad valuable--ah, rich people).  His holdings include the former sugar cane acreage in Kauai that many years ago was irrigated with a series of tunnels dug by (let's call them) workers.  Case's high school friend had an idea: what if they were to turn the abandoned sugar cane farm into an adventure Eco-tourism destination.  Zip-lining, hiking, oh, and a tubing run through the irrigation tunnels.  Sounds like a plan, said Case, and so, here we were today.  I guess you don't get to be that rich without also being clever: Case purifies the water on his estate (presumably after we all tube in it) and sells it back to the state of Hawaii.

To get to the tube run, we jumped in a passenger van with our group and drove up through some lovely landscape.

Panoramas tall ...

and panoramas wide.

Clouds like whipped topping on a dense green dessert.  Imagine owning all this.

We were advised to wear water-friendly shoes and told that in addition to our tubes, we'd be getting hardhats with lights and gloves.  As we donned our hats and gloves and grabbed our tubes to make our way into the rushing water, we were also told that we could refer to its temperature in any number of ways: brisk, invigorating, refreshing, enlivening were examples given.  However, we were NEVER to refer to the water as "cold."  Ned missed this briefing and was the last into the rushing, quite refreshing water.  So, when he referred to it as cold, he was rewarded with many splashes of invigorating and brisk water :)

This truly was great fun!  The day was warm but not beating down hot and we had nice cloud cover as we drifted and spun down the irrigation tunnels surrounded by high earthen walls.  The gloves helped in pushing off the banks when we got jammed up.

Note those stretched out legs on Harper below: for especially exciting moments of the run, they'd be tucked in along with her elbows (and all of our legs and elbows for that matter).  At those points, we'd be in the tunnels--pitch dark and hand carved well over 100 years ago.  As we approached a tunnel, a shouted message would pass from the front of the pack to the back: "Lights Up!"  We'd flip up our hardhat lights and pull in our legs and arms as we entered.  For some reason, the water rushed much more wildly through the tunnels, and our tubes would spin and spin, careening off each other and the walls, as our lights bounced wildly around in the dark.  And, the helmets came in quite handy as the "ceilings" of the tunnels were low and uneven.  In all, it was the thrill ride that a place like Disney seeks to replicate but with all the fun-scary dangers that are risk-managed out.





Behold the red Crocs of Ned.





Along the route, there were a few mini-rapids where Backcountry Adventures cameras would snap photos.  We didn't buy them but we did screen grab them, complete with watermark.





The entire experience got eight gloved thumbs up from these tubers!

After adventuring in the backcountry for the afternoon, we took our refreshed selves back to the Pride of America for some warm showers.

Another Hawaiian night, another gorgeous sunset.  It starts deceptively plain, a soft white sun streaking a column of light across the ocean.



As it nears the water line, some magical alchemy starts to occur, and a fire begins to burn up through the clouds that carry its heat across the sky.





Sending bright streamers of color far beyond the horizon.

Until the fire begins to cool to a soft glow blanketed by heavy clouds.

Thank you Kauai, thank you Steve Case, thank you twirling tubes--at the end of this enlivening day, we felt warmed by your welcoming, adventurous nature!