Day 3

The weather our 3rd day in Kauai consisted of (you guessed it) rain, clouds, and rain...but we didn't let it stop us!!  We had a number of hikes that we wanted to accomplish while we were in Kauai...but most of those didn't happen unfortunately because of the weather.  However!  We accomplished (sort of) the Sleeping Giant:

Nounou Mountain

The beginning is between hedges of pretty awesome homes.

I loved how different the forest was from what we are used to!

Um, that's not rain...it was humid!

So we got to what we thought was the top, since there was nowhere to go up anymore.  Turns out, we didn't quite finish the hike and had slightly more to go up.  Next time!

After hiking, we headed out for our surfing lessons.  We went with this small set-up that doesn't seem very official, but it was super cheap.  The waves were not super intense, but the water was high and for a shorty like me, a little too high.  It took me like 3x as long to get back out to the instructor as the 3 guys doing it...not fair!  We both caught a few waves.  When we left, I never wanted to surf again, since I felt like I sucked in more salt water than air...but Steve had a blast and we decided to give it another go later on in the week...we had more success!

The beach where we surfed...please note, those waves look smaller than they are... at least the water level is deeper. :)

Exhausted

It then began raining.  We hadn't eaten lunch since our early morning breakfast and it was late afternoon after our lesson, so we ate at a Mexican restaurant that we'd heard was the best on the island.  It was good...the most fun was the people watching, but isn't that usually how it goes?  We then headed back south and checked out another beach, where we saw our first (but not last!) sea turtle: