I went out on our balcony this morning before breakfast and was greeted by evidence that we were truly on Kauai – a chicken walking by the building.

We started our day with massages here at the resort, followed by a visit to the Princeville Farmers and Arts Market. Most of the vendors were artisans, but there were a few farmers, so we picked up some local citrus and rambutans.

We drove to Kilauea for lunch at Kilauea Fish Market (ahi wraps, yum!) and continued onward to the Kilauea Lighthouse to see what we could see.

The lighthouse is part of the Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge, and there was a lot of wildlife to enjoy seeing. Butterflies, for example.

And lots of nene (Hawaiian Geese).

And Laysan Albatross.

We even saw a whale! Here’s the best photo I got – the fluke is clearly visible.

I will spare you the twenty or so photos I took which only show the whale’s spout, and the forty which only showed empty ocean.

We stopped at Kong Lung Market Center and wandered around for a while. Unfortunately, the shave ice store there had already closed for the day, so we had to go to the Ching Young Village in Hanalei to get shave ice at JoJo’s.

We looked at a few of the shops in the center before going back to the resort for a quiet evening.

It’s been a day of airplanes, airports, and driving.

We left our house about 6:45am Pacific for a 9:15 flight to Maui (very pleasant), a four-hour layover (less pleasant), a short flight to Kauai where we picked up our rental, and an hour’s drive to our home for the next week, the Westin Princeville Villas. Door-to-door time: 14-plus hours, which left us just enough time for a quick and tasty dinner in the resort restaurant before it closed, followed by a dash to the nearby Foodland to get breakfast supplies before it closed.

Vacations are wonderful; I’m looking forward to this one!

Now, back to packing….

The new Mac mini is humming along as a media server and a place to join Zoom meetings. I haven’t spent any timesetting up its command-line environment yet, which may be just as well.

I caught up on officially finishing a few Toastmasters projects and submitting them in the system which means I’ve successfully completed Level 1 of Dynamic Leadership.

I finally got Home Assistant properly connected to the instrumentation on our solar power system, so I can see power use, battery status, and power generation at a glance. It should be more interesting when the sun is shining.

We also took a few walks; not all the trees change here, but the ginkgos certainly do!

And we booked our timeshare in Maui for this week next year!

I made a few more attempts to revive the old Mac mini without success; trying to update beyond Yosemite seems to be futile. So I punted and bought a new Mac mini at Best Buy; unfortunately, the only configuration in stock there (or at the Apple Store) was rather small: 8GB memory with a 512GB SSD, which wouldn’t hold my entire Plex library, so I added an external 1TB SSD.

I spent most of the afternoon and evening installing software; now I’m copying my movies and music from the Time Machine backup to the external SSD. It will take all night; I’m not going to watch!