Day 10 - Taro Ponds Overlook, Limahuli Gardens, Wet Cave, and RandomStop#55 & 56

And most importantly my first double rainbow!!  If you look closely, you can see the second rainbow on to the left of the bright rainbow.  It was so exciting!  I have been promised stars and double rainbows, and this is my first time to see both.  Hopefully, we will get to see a Hawaiian Monk Seal?!?

Here is the Taro fields, well,m Taro is grown.  Taro is very important in the Hawaiian culture.  

Limahuli Gardens - this is the Hale that we helped to complete last year.  It is exciting to see it completed! Dr. Winter talked to us about Ethnobotany and the Hawaiian culture.  He took us on a tour and then set us on a Service Learning project planting native and endangered plants in the forest.  It was interesting that they are keeping some of the non-native plants for shade so that the native plants can grow and not get too much light.  They are trying different things out to see what works best.

Here I am with a piece of Sugar Cane...right off of the stalk.  It was Ok.  I did not like to too much.  I also ate a flower...well, I did not actually eat it.  I put it in my mouth and bit into a petal.  Then I returned it to nature :-)

So, now I have to confess that I sort of hurt myself yesterday on the hike out of the waterfall tour.  A student was holding onto the rope as was I.  She slipped and fell pretty bad and took me down with her.  I fell on my knees pretty hard, fell on top of my walking stick and broke it, and buggered up my pinky toe and toenail.  Ugh.  I got more hurt than the student that fell.  Anyways, I tried making the hike into where we were doing service learning, but I did not make it very far.  It was muddy and there were steps.  My knees were not going to have it.  So, I turned around and went back down.  This would have been my plant that I planted in the forest, but it was not.  

Instead, I took a few pictures of the river, and then found a cool place to sit and eat. 

Here is the place that I ate lunch and read my book on my phone.  Thank goodness for Kindle!  I dangled my sore toe in the water hoping for some Hawaiian healing water to fix my toe.  I don't know about that, but I do know that the cool water felt good.  It is apparently a popular place to swim.  There were quite a few people that went swimming in there.  

Once the students got back, we piled into the cars and went to go see the Wet Cave...like a dry cave, but with water.  Yep.  That is about it!

Random stop # 55 was at a place on the side of the road.  There is a geological dike there.  I did not take a picture, but I did find this pretty flower.  

We stopped at Banana Joe's Fruit Market that has fruit smoothies, ice cream, organic, locally grown produce, etc.  They were out of the stuff to make smoothies, but they did have other produce.  I had to take a picture of this pineapple.  I have never seen one for almost $24 before.  Yikes!  I guess that I will end with the second picture here...Aloha!