Books By Patti Liszkay
Available On Amazon
and the sequel, "Hail Mary" https://www.amzn.com/1684334888
Available on Amazon.
THE MANOA FALLS TRAIL
Turned out the websites were lying through their teeth about the flip-flops and also about this being an easy hike for kids, unless they were referring to little mountain goats. It certainly wasn't an easy hike for human adults. At least not this human adult. All right, this old human adult.
However I had an inkling that this might be the case, as I recalled the time during Tom's and my 2015 trip to Kauai when we attempted to hike the Alaka'i Swamp trail, which the Hawaii guidebooks rated as "moderate."
About 250 feet into the trail I, a veteran hiker of the 450-mile Spanish Camino de Santiago de Compostela, threw in the towel when faced with the steepest, most slippery and treacherous patch of rock I’d ever run into. (See https://www.ailantha.com/blog/two-hikers-in-search-of-a-trail).
But not at first. At the beginning the trail was fairly smooth. if somewhat muddy, and we were not far along before learning one thing that the websites were altogether truthful about: the views were indeed spectacularly beautiful.
I'm not sure how far along the .8 mile trail we'd gone - maybe a quarter of the way, maybe a third - when the smooth, muddy path became a stony, muddy path,
I felt sorry for all the people - most of them, in fact, probably due to the garden path they'd been led down by the websites - who were inadequately shod for the slick, rocky climb.
"Oh," she huffed, gesturing towards our walking sticks. "Are there any more of those sticks at the top?"
I was truly sorry to have to tell her that there weren't.