Nawiliwili, Kauai Hawaii

We have been on the island of Kauai several times so we did not sign up for any excursions.  Instead, we walked to a shopping area near the port.

Off ship for a little shopping.  We made the required purchase at the ABC store along with a couple of other stores.  ABC stores are jokingly called "All Blocks Covered" because they are everywhere in tourist cities in the islands. Then we went back to the ship for lunch.

The park next to the shopping area was nice.

Time to leave the Hawaiian Islands and head back across the open ocean toward Vancouver.

We did get a pretty sunset.

We missed the eruption of Mauna Loa by just over a month.  Wow, bad timing on our part.  Like we could have timed being there on time. I don't think so.

The show on the main-stage was Humanity.  Wow!  It was fantastic.  We are not supposed to take photos or video of any of the Main Stage shows but I did find a couple of pictures from the dance companies site to show what we watched.

Warning History ahead:

I guess it is about time for me to inject a bit of history into the posts on our visit to Hawaii.
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The islands are a system of eruption flows that are known as the Honolulu Volcanic Series. The chain is much longer than just the islands we can see with many older ones that have sunken back under the oceans surface all the way back to Midway island over 1,500 miles from the current islands

Hawaii is a string of volcanic islands of that series still above sea level. The islands are  moving northwest away from a Pacific plate tectonic hotspot where lava comes up from deep in the earth and creates the islands.  

The next island is growing.  The Lö’ihi Seamount it about 20 miles off shore of the Big Island but still well below the surface at over 3000 feet but is growing steadily.  Don't expect to visit or even see the new island any time soon.  It is estimated that it will start to break the surface for thousands of years.

The first people to arrive on the islands were from Polynesia around 1,500 years ago.  That is right.  The islands had NO people until about 300 to 600AD. They brought their native seeds and plants, like taro and sugar cane, along with animals, including pigs and chickens. There was no contact from outside of the islands for well over 1000 years. 

There is a debate on if a British expedition captained by James Cook or a Spanish ship was the first Europeans to find the islands.  At that time the Hawaiian's had explored all the islands and lived on each.  The population of the islands was over 300,000 people at that time.  The Hawaiian people had kings, queens, leaders of areas or individual islands.  There were even wars between groups for power and lands.

Hawaiian society was organized in what they called Ahupuaʻa for organizing the society, economy, geology and climatic division of land. Each island had its own Ahupua'a and was organized to meet the needs of the local population with an excess which was used for tribute to the rulers and for trade with the other islands.

The Hawaiians never wanted to be part of the United States and always wanted to remain an independent country. They were forced to become a state. Near the end of the 1800's the US government supported a "Sugar Baron" to subdue the people and maximize profits. Hawaii only became a state in 1959.