Cindy warned me.

This is not the type of thing you want to experience on a trip to the garden island. I have worn glasses since my teens and need them to function. 

For some reason Cindy suggested I bring a spare pair of glasses for this trip. Of all the trips we have taken, this is the first time we have done this. 

This is the pair I found in a desk drawer. I have no idea how long ago these were my daily pair. I think this was the same era in which I also wore a necklace of wooden beads. 

Oh, this photo also shows me sporting my new hair cut. 

Not all palms bear coconuts

How folks, including me, get strange ideas in their heads is interesting. I fancy myself having a fairly decent understanding of most things biological, but for some reasons I had assumed the palm trees bear coconuts and that was that. Somehow in this misunderstanding there must be some nugget of insight. All of us have limited life experiences whether we know it or not and those experiences we have not had offer the possibility of learning things we presently do not assume we do not know. I apologize for the last sentence, but I am not going to try it again.

So, we like acai bowls and know that the redish/purpleish slush that is the base of the acai bowl comes from a berry of some sort. The images that follow are acai bowls. You can't see the acai because it is located at the bottom of the bowl. I think you can get an acai bowl at the COSTCO food stand and this would be a way to taste what I describe. You can also purchase the frozen berries there to make your own (acai, granola, bananas, and peanut butter is a great combination).

Convinced these berries must be grown on the island somewhere I did a little online research. This is where I learned that the berry grows on palm tree and palm trees produce something other than coconuts. 

From my research I learned that the berry grows in this fringy type stuff I realized I had observed  below the fronds on palm trees. No berries, but the location seemed to match where the berries would appear.

We then spotted these berries. There were located in the right place on the tree. Natasha found one on the ground. It was obviously red and not purple, but also larger and more oblong than the berry we were looking for. However, again, we had not seen any alternatives to this palm so perhaps the berry had yet to ripen.

I use an app on my phone that allows the identification of unfamiliar plants. It is called Plant Snap. if you are an iPhone user and think plant identification is interesting the app might be useful. I loaded the image you see above into PlantSnap and the match came back as Manila or Christmas Palm. The color, size, and time of year for the berries and the information that this is an ornamental palm common in Hawaii convinced me that we have yet to discover an example of the source of the elusive acai berry. This is not the palm you seek.

P.S. - the acai bowl from Costco.

Kauai Coffee

I am a coffee guy. Some folks, probably more, fancy themselves wine people, I think of my interest in coffee in a similar way.

To my knowledge, Hawaii is the only state that grows coffee as a farm product. Contrasting coffee as grown on Hawaii (big island) and Kauai is interesting. We have visited multiple coffee "plantations" in the Kona region of the big island and these farms are small. None we visited would be viable unless they had some supporting activities such as tourism or coffee processing. The planation we have now visited multiple times on Kauai is huge - 4 million trees (coffee fact - a coffee tree produces about one pound of coffee). Size matters in some interesting ways. Kona coffee is picked by hand with the pickers taking the cherries from the trees at different times to focus on the ripe berries. Kauai coffee is picked once by special mechanical pickers. The overripe cherries float so immersing the fruit in water allows the fruit that is too ripe to be discarded. However, underripe cherries are processed along with the ripe cherries which could be argued to change the quality of the product. I am guessing few can tell the difference or care.

Loco moco

The loco moco is as Hawaiian as spam. Hearty would be the way I would describe it. A hamburger on top of rice covered with an egg and brown gravy. My capacity isn't what it used to be and it is now more than I can handle. Maybe Hawaiian comfort food or the type of food Guy Fieri would feature on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives would be a way to explain the dish (sure enough).

It probably looked more attractive before I forgot myself and started eating without first getting a  photo, but this way you can see the layers.

Here is the recipe and the origin story of the loco moco. I have noticed since first consuming the dish some years ago that there is a "put an egg on it" trend. Maybe this is where it started.

Least-Heat Moon

When you spend two months away from what you describe as your home base, it is a little different than taking what most would describe as a trip. You have decided to live somewhere else for a while. You do many of the same things you would do when at home because seeking new adventures on a daily basis is not the way most of us live our lives. Cindy might disagree as she sees daily life as an adventure, but I am not the same live each day to the fullest type person.

I spend about the same amount of time here reading and writing I would spend at home. The coffee shop changes and the route to walk there is different and warmer, but the core activities are very similar.

I have been listening to Blue Highways a book by William Least-Heat Moon I first read several decades ago. There are so many books I want to read that I have already purchased that rereading a book from "the early years" is very rare. Blue highways refers to secondary roads which at the time the book was written were blue on paper maps. My appreciation of the book is based on the quality of the author's ability to write very interesting prose telling the stories of his adventures linking to my own interest in travel by car for extended trips. Finding the book again as an audiobook available from one of the libraries I frequent was great.

One of the interesting things about my second exploration of this book is the addition of all of the life experiences I have accumulated since I first read this book. Least-Heat Moon's route roughly followed the perimeter of the country and he describing passing through some of the territory I have experienced. During this listen I appreciated his description of his journey through northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. I have walked across the origins of the Mississippi at the location he described and the town of Danbury is northern Wisconsin is the closest town to our Wisconsin lake home. He describes Danbury as dismal, but he may have passed through at night this time of year when he should have been in Hawaii.

I highly recommend this author's writing. His capacity to tell stories about the places he travels through is a gift I greatly admire. He has a way of describing people tied to their places in the country that offers many lessons.