Update 4.07.2018 from Kauai

Friday night, our entertainer was a ventriloquist.  He was very good and had three different dolls.  Sometimes, he was making two sounds at the same time, very impressive.

Today our excursion today was a bus tour that took us to a waterfall and a train ride around a plantation.  It rained most of the time, but it is April in the tropics.  The Plantation grows all organic fruits and vegetables for the local farmer’s markets and restaurants.  The train ride took us through an impressive orchard of perfect rows of a large variety of tropical fruit and nut trees.

All over Kauai were wild chickens.  Kauai is the only island that did not make the mistake of importing the mongoose to control rats.  So the chickens have no enemies, no predators and multiply freely. At any particular time if the word is out that someone is feeding, they come running, all in the same direction.  It looks like a stampede, all running, none flying.

Walmart charters shuttles from the ship to the stores and back, mainly for crew, but passengers can go also.  We did today.  After our excursion this morning, we came back to the ship for lunch then took the shuttle to Walmart.  We have recently discovered that John is using more masks than we had planned for, because of the humidity.  Since this was our last US port, we decided that since we had the time, we should go out to Walmart.  The shuttle holds 25 passengers; no one is allowed to stand.  We got on the shuttle out right away, but when we got to Walmart, there was a line of about 50 people waiting to get back to the ship.  We had overheard a hint to walk the couple of blocks to Hilo Hattie’s and catch their shuttle back to the ship.  We did and that worked well for us.  Another interesting thing we saw at Walmart, was they had no bags. We had noticed on other islands that there are no plastic bags though some stores had paper bags.  Here, people would check out, and then dump the loose items back into the shopping cart.  Very few brought their own bags, except those on our ship almost always had their blue Princess bag.  We were dropped off at a local village, and we walked back to the ship.

Colleen and John