Thursday morning, our last day in Kauai and second-to-last day in Hawaii, started off on the wrong foot. The previous day at the Kauai water tubing excursion we had met a couple that showed us videos from their open-door helicopter tour they did of Kauai. It turns out that over 60% of Kauai is privately owned, and therefore impossible to see, unless you see it by air. Grainne and I had been on two helicopter rides before, but we’d never done an open-door one, and so this sounded really exciting / crazy. So after getting back to our computers, we booked a helicopter tour for the next day, which was today. The only issue was that when we showed up in the morning for our tour, the tour company told me they had been trying to contact me because they were cancelling all tours for today as it was too windy. When we were outside, it didn’t feel windy at all. I was frustrated by it so I started calling other tour companies to see if they were still doing tours. Sure enough, all were, and we ended up booking a tour for later that day. With time to kill then since it was only around 8am and our new tour time was 2pm, we decided to hike the Maha’ulepa Heritage trail. This was my favorite hike of the trip. The waves were crashing really hard against the rocks and it was just really cool to be walking along this trail in such a picture perfect day.

Along the way, we went off the trail a little bit to find the Makauwahi Cave Reserve. It was totally hidden off the edge. Those are people down there!

Here’s more pictures of the absolutely beautiful hike:

And here’s more pictures of the cave: