Thursday, June 20, 2024

On Thursday, we had shuttle reservations to Ha’ena State Park. I had tried to get one of the coveted parking spaces by waking up at 5am 30 days out, but had no luck.

We grabbed a quick breakfast to go at Hanalei Bread, then quickly jumped on the shuttle (barely made it!) and headed out to the state park. There’s no eating or drinking allowed on the shuttle, but there are picnic tables as soon as you arrive at Ha’ena, so we ate our breakfast right after we were dropped off.

It was a little drizzly that morning, but we walked over to Ke’e Beach, and got my mom set up at one of the picnic tables underneath the trees that overlooks the beach while the three of us got ready to head out on the hike of Kalalua trail.

Our plan was to try to make it two miles to the waterfall and then back, but based on how yesterday’s hike had gone, I wasn’t quite sure how far we would make it.

Again, this trail was quite technical for LS. She is a very cautious child and is not a risk taker at all, so if you have a more adventurous six year old, I think you would be fine, but she was very scared to go up and down many of the rocks, but also didn’t want us to help her. This means it was pretty slow going. About half a mile in, we found her a good walking stick, which gave her some confidence, and she proudly proclaimed to every single person we met along the trail that she had a walking stick.

After about 50 minutes, we hadn’t even gone a mile, so we decided to turn around at this point, as it was going to take us 4 hours to complete the hike at the pace we were going. We headed back and spent the rest of the time at the beach.