Waimea Canyon

    Continued from yesterday:

    On Saturday morning we drove from Barking Sands missile range (where there's no place that serves breakfast)  7 miles to the closest town, the town of Waimea, for breakfast.

    This worked out fine, though, because it was on the way to our planned event for the day, a hike down into the Waimea Canyon.
    We found a restaurant in Waimea, a cute little place called Yums.

Waimea

...where we met a nice group of local guys who come there to meet and play cards.  They reminded me of my Panera Posse.

    Our breakfast at Yum's was in fact  quite yummy:

But what I liked best about the place was all the cheery little signs hanging about:

    After breakfast we headed for the steep road to Waimea Canyon and drove 18 miles uphill until we reached the Waimea Canyon lookout at  3400 feet above sea level (sea level was where we were when we started out at the bottom of the road).

    Views of  Waimea Canyon, the Grand Canyon of the Pacific, from the lookout:

See the waterfall in the background.

And, of course:

    From the canyon lookout we drove a few miles to the beginning of the Canyon Trail to the Waipo'o Falls. 
    This trail descended about 450 feet into the canyon, was 6 miles round trip and took us about 4 hours to complete.
    The trail was labeled "moderately strenuous" and was a bit tricky in spots:

     But it offered some breath-taking vistas:

The little white object hovering about  an inch above Tom's head is a helicopter.  Helicopter tours of the Waimea Canyon are a very popular tourist attraction.

    At the bottom of the trail was a beautiful little waterfall spilling into a clear pool,

...which bore an uncanny resemblance to a  waterfall we saw at the Grand Hyatt Kauai Hotel at Poipu Beach (see post from 4/5/2015):

    We stayed at the falls for a little while and had a snack, then headed back up the trail to the top of the canyon.
    We made it back to Barking Sands in time to watch the sun set during dinner at Shenanigans,   the all hands club (see post from 4/5/2015):

The view from our table.

    After dinner we headed over to the base theater,

which consists of a screen and some benches set up in a field,

    ...to watch that night's movie, "Jurassic Park".
    What a great movie.  The only thing better than watching "Jurassic Park" is watching it under the stars on the island where it was filmed.