Kauai Is Real Pretty, but…

Everything is relative, everything is a matter of context and contrast.

Well, I don’t know if EVERYTHING is, but a lot of stuff. Sounded like a good intro line, anyway.

Visited the Island of Kauai for the first time this past week. I had heard for years that it is the Garden Isle, far and away the most beautiful of the Hawai’ian Islands. One person went so far as to say that nothing else in Hawai’i is Hawai’i to them, except Kauai.

Kauai is really nice. It probably is, overall, generally speaking, the prettiest island of the ones I have seen (Big, O’ahu, Maui, Kauai.)

But I live on O’ahu, which has some of the prettiest beaches, landscapes, seascapes, surfs, and cultural stuff I have ever experienced in my life.

If you flew to Kauai from Cleveland, or Santa Fe, or Arkansas, or Montana, or Germany, you could very, very easily walk away completely mind-blown at the beauty it offers. Major OMG moments.

But I regularly frequent Sandy Beach, Makapu’u Beach, Halona Beach (my favorite so far in Hawai’i), the North Shore, Waimanalo Beach, the Valley of the Temples, Waikiki, Sans Souci Beach, the Elks Lodge right on the water at Waikiki, and I drive that drive all along the shore from Hawai’i Kai to Kailua. I also drive the Pali and the Likelike Highways, through the gorgeous, jungle-y middle of the Island of O’ahu.

I gotta tell you. Kauai is real pretty, but I live around real, real pretty all the time. So my experience is kind of like “This is really nice. I like it a lot.” But not “OMG, Kauai is unbelievable!!!!” 

It is very believable. It is a Hawai’ian Island, one of many. And to the best of my knowledge, they are all surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, and all have beaches galore, and fascinating landscapes, and unique features.

MacKenzie State Recreation Area, upon which I kind of accidentally stumbled one day wandering around the Big Island (the Island of Hawai’i), is about as pretty as anything I saw last week in Kauai. I had never even heard of it in my life, and pulled over just for no reason, and wowza—we’re talking pretty!

Maui also had some real nice beaches that I saw—nothing that really looked any more interesting than beaches that are nine miles from my house on O’ahu, but hey, nice beaches.

I suspect if one spent a million dollars getting to Kauai, or Maui, or wherever, and/or if it was kind of a bucket-listy or “once-in-a-lifetime” trip, then there is probably some press to find it unbelievably unbelievable. I get that. Especially if you flew in from Cleveland, and the aforementioned locations.

So now, having visited the main islands here in Hawai’i, I come to realize that the extent to which one is mindblown by the beauty of any given island (or any “Must-See” place on earth, for that matter), is going to depend in part on where you came from. If you travel from Santa Fe to Arizona, you will be less blown over by the landscape there than if you flew to Sedona from Maine. The Rockies are more awesome to a flatlander than to someone who just came in from the Cascades of Washington. I experience Chicago as Cleveland times 1.5 (this annoys Chicagoans no end) because I was brought up in “Big Midwestern City on a Great Lake” and it’s not all that different.

As I said, everything is relative, everything is a matter of context and contrast.

And anyway, I liked Kauai plenty. You’d be surprised by the traffic, though, for a small place.

James Mick Nolan, Psychologist

Text me at 505-699-7616

I take a whole bunch of insurances in New Mexico and Hawai’i…

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