Today, I had to take our car in for repairs, but how to do that with Leilani? The only thing I could think of was to put Mommy’s bicycle with the bicycle seat in the back and go for a ride while they fixed A’ala Pua. After I struggled to get the bike in the car (it hung out the back and I had to tie the tailgate half-open), we actually got to the garage on time at 8am.
Fortunately, the new bike path starts just across the main highway from the garage, so we didn’t have to bike on any dangerous streets. This is the section in Kapaa, next to the Pono Kai condos. I recently learned this was the site of the pineapple cannery in Kapaa, and the bike path follows the old train tracks that delivered the pineapples from the fields around town to the cannery.
Taking the car to the garage early worked out well. It was cooler and the light was pretty. I took a few artistic shots as we biked along. We were heading to Kealia beach, 3 miles (5 km) north of Kapaa along the coats on the new bike path.
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Here we are at the near end of Kealia. And below is the far end, where there is a shallow and sheltered area for Leilani to swim. Right now there is lots of wind and fairly big waves, but the sheltered area is behind a man-made rock jetty.
But Leilani didn’t want to swim. As fun as it is for adults to go somewhere new and find a place to swim, Leilani only wants to go swimming in the kiddie pool at Lydgate beach “near our house” as she says. I think that’s where she’s comfortable and knows she’s safe, but unfortunately the bike path doesn’t go there yet. So she just climbed on the trees and on the bike (it stood up by itself against the tree and rocks).
She wanted to pick this hibiscus near the garage, and she’d held onto it ever since. She likes flowers, although she doesn’t like to put hem in her hair. The bike helmet, which was the only child’s helmet at the store, has elephants playing baseball (?!?), but she loves it and calls them Dumbo, after her current-favorite movie.
But her favorite attraction of the day were the big machines working back in Kapaa. Below is a dredger (and a very quick photo-stitch) that is making the channel to the boat dock deeper. It is actually an excavator sitting on a barge. After digging in the river-bottom and loading up the barge, they would unload all the sand on the shore, and a front loader would put it in a dump-truck. Then the truck would drive 150 feet (50m) and dump it in big piles that you can see in the background. I don’t know what they plan on doing with the sand, hopefully replenish some of the eroding beaches.
Leilani wanted to watch for 20 minutes until they had unloaded the barge and went back out to dig underwater. It was also fun to watch them “navigate,” because thew would use the arm of the excavator to move the barge around and up the channel by pulling on the stream-bed. Then he would just go to work, plunging the bucket into the water and scooping sand out of the bottom and into the barge. I have to admit that I enjoyed watching it too.
After all this, it was 10:30 and very hot already. I know she loves to play in the water, so I suggested we go to Baby Beach, a little beach near the bike path that is shallow and has no waves at all. But she wanted Lydgate or nothing, and she said she was hungry, so we went to get an early lunch at Papaya’s nearby–and she got a free sticker to put on her bicycle seat. Leilani ran around the grass for a while, and then we biked to the garage not far away. The car was fixed so we loaded the bike again and drove to Lydgate where she swam and splashed happily.
