Today we kicked off the day with bread pudding french toast I soaked overnight in eggs & milk, topped with coconut syrup. We used Hawaiian sweet bread, but challah or brioche would be an excellent substitute. With maple syrup this would make an excellent Christmas morning breakfast. From there we drove out of Princeville to find a beach we read about online. According to the site, several episodes of Gilligan's Island were filmed here. That's not why we decided to go though. The site also said that during the summer it had calm waters, excellent for swimming and that it was usually deserted since no one really knew about it. We arrived and the waves were pounding the shore but we could see off in the distance an area that was protected by a reef and boulders so we made our way over there. And the number of people? Three. One of them was an older gentleman in a Speedo that never stopped working on his tan. If you didn't know he was there you wouldn't have seen him. We set up our chairs, umbrella, and cooler down at the far side and hung out for a couple of hours, bracing ourselves when a pretty significant rain storm hit. Soon though the skies were bright blue again. We left when Alan's Kindle bit the dust. (The screen stopped working in a haphazard way, something my trusty iPhone - running on the Edge network - told us happens frequently enough that people do a lot of searches for this particular problem.) After grabbing lunch in town we drove down to Anini Beach. The same website that told us about Moloa'a Bay said that if you go past the picnic pavilions - usually packed with locals - you can find equally good beach areas and snorkeling. I think they're smoking crack. All we found were hundreds of people fishing and looking for crab. We tried snorkeling but I gave up after a very short while and decided I wanted to go somewhere else. We ended the day at Hanalei Bay, near the house from The Descendants. (This is confirmed by the big old "keep out! private property!" signs near the bushes.) After the beach we came back to the condo to relax and cook dinner - a dish we've been making, I think, since our 2008 trip to Kauai. This time, however, I added cut pineapple to the marinade and ohmygoodness was that a great addition. We came back to the condo and I promptly passed out at 9 p.m. after declining to go to Lapperts for ice cream. This, unfortunately, means once again I'm awake in the middle of the night.
