Hawaiian Family Vacation Day 7 – Kauai

Date: February 24th, 2026

After waking up and doing a bit of research to see what stores were nearby, Jill and I drove to the nearby Big Save Market and bought some groceries for the rest of the week. We picked up supplies for tacos and spaghetti, and a couple of frozen pizzas for meals along with snacks, and bread, turkey, tuna, PB & J, cheese, for lunches and eggs, and Portuguese sausage for breakfast.

We wanted to do something adventurous so we started looking around on Google Maps to see what was nearby. I found a Spouting Horn attraction along with a Lava Arch. The Lava Arch included a nearby Maha’ulepu Heritage Trail, so we landed on that for our mid-day adventure.

The parking lot at the trailhead only had around half-a-dozen spaces and they were all taken when we arrived. There was plenty of room for those already parked to backup so I figured we could park along the far-side of the lot, but just as we were starting along the trail, a group fortuitously came back from their visit so we moved the vehicle to where they had previously parked.

We started along the blacktop trail that ran alongside a luxurious house with an infinity pool. The trail opened up to a grassy field laid out just before dark lava rocks that skirted around the ocean. There were several worn footpaths that jetted off from the paved trail and the explorer in me couldn’t resist the suspense of what so many others must have been going to see. The dirt paths led right to the Lava Arch, a natural black bridge made out of igneous rock that had been worn through by the centuries of waves crashing against it to finally break through and create this magnificent rock formation.

We climbed around on the rocks, admiring the beautiful Pacific splashing against them for a good half-hour or more crawling along the porous stones, seeing what we could find in various tide pools. At one location, we could hear air being sucked in and out of a dime-sized hole in the rock and I realized that it must be hollow under us and the waves were pushing air through that hole, causing whistling whooshing sound. I envisioned the rock giving way, falling 30 feet into a turbulent whirlpool below and decided to slowly make my exit from that location.

The panoramic views were incredible. I felt like I could explore and enjoy that area all day, but the girls had started heading back, so I begrudgingly followed.

After returning from our little adventure, we came back to our condo to fuel up on some of our freshly purchased groceries and prepare for an afternoon at the beach. Mattix and I made sure to put on plenty of sunscreen (we are a lot more fair-skinned than the girls are) and we all grabbed beach chairs and towels along with some drinks.

In addition to the sea turtles on the beach, we found a monk seal taking a nap on the warm sand. After finding a spot to claim as our own on the beach, Mattix and I took a swim with our snorkels and the GoPro. The water was fairly clear but very shallow in the area just off the beach. There were tons of coral and fish around to keep us entertained and the further out we swam the deeper the water and the bigger the fish.

We had a great time soaking up the sun and watching the sea turtles come on to the beach for the evening. We even got to hear a bit about the history of the area and more about the turtles from a local group that is helping to protect the sea turtles. Malama i na hanu was there along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration educating people about the turtles and scanning their flippers for tags to download data to better understand their travel patterns.

We learned that Poipu Beach is one of the only beaches that sea turtles will bask on, and as far as they know, they have come there for thousands of years. In the recent past, they have come to rest on the beach more in the late hours of the night, but when Covid hit and the beaches were quiet, the turtles started coming back earlier, more often and in greater numbers. They were selling stickers to help pay for the tracking devices they put on them so we bought a couple to help us remember our treasured time there.

We sat and listened to the guy from Malama i na hanu as we watched the sun go down. It was another spectacular day in paradise.