What a great sky to wake up to on Christmas Eve, or any day for that matter. That pineapple seen in yesterday’s photos was cut up along with some of the bananas we picked up at the farmer’s market and were used in making our breakfast of tropical oatmeal.

The last time we stayed at Kahili Mountain, we only used the location for a launchpad and place to lay our head down; this time, we were hoping to spend a while checking out the local landscape. There are 197 acres of land to explore, and we certainly won’t be able to see but a small fraction of those.

Behind our cabin is a small stream that is a little too wide to jump over, it is also the border of the property. We will take our time, giving nearly three hours to walk the perimeter to find what we might discover. This being Kauai, also known as the garden island, you can rest assured that we are out here looking for flowers and scenes not easily seen from our vantage point looking up the mountain or over the horizon at sunrise.

There are a lot of strikingly beautiful, delicate splashes of color out here, and it’s winter. I’d love to see what summer brings when the full bloom is on, but the idea of the humidity is a detractor.

Every corner and nearly every step forward shows us something new. All of this and no entry fee besides the cost of renting our cabin, which was an incredible bargain at only $85 a night with a free night thrown in because we were staying a week.

I took a nearly identical photo on the Big Island years ago, but as of this writing I’ve not done justice to that trip to Hawaii, but someday I’ll expand on the single photo per day that I posted back then.

Not your average garden variety spiders around here, right monsters that are difficult to get a bead on as to where the head, tail, or sides are at. Beautiful monsters, in any case.

We don’t see many orchids in Arizona besides the ones at florists.

I’d love to know what this is because when it blooms, it does something extraordinary.

It explodes into a fleshy meat bloom. Full disclosure: I didn’t note specifically that this somewhat ghastly sight belonged to the above image, but my memory is assuring me that the two are related.

What the heck, is this a fern tree?

Suckers for rain forests, as who doesn’t love seeing a garden within the garden?

This tree has some of the strangest leaves we’ve ever seen. This is why visiting a botanical garden is so helpful, as they identify the plants that we are looking at.

Mmmmm, yellow asparagus with fragrant blossoms, though Caroline insists that I’m wrong. If I’m starting to see food in the forest, I guess that means I’m getting hungry. Time to head to Koloa.

This is the mess of Poke Bento I’ve been going about. It’s not very pretty, but I often have that issue when photographing food I’m in love with. I must admit that I’m quite surprised that the Koloa Fish Market is open here on Christmas Eve.

Armed with the greatest lunch we could hope for, it was time to head to Poipu to enjoy our feast. Under the same palm tree where we finished our previous trip to Kauai, we finished our lunch and shared a sweet potato haupia dessert before Caroline went out for some snorkeling, and I stayed put and wrote.

For a moment, we were considering going back to the top of Kauai for a return visit to Tahiti Nui, but once again, all of the traffic was foiling our plans. Rather than deal with the crush, Caroline takes us out on a detour into a park-like setting with what looks like a pretty good swimming hole, but we have other plans and were hoping for a shortcut to Wailua Falls that didn’t work out. So we turned around to the main road.

South of Kapaa but not quite in Lihue, we turn off for the four-mile drive up the road to Wailua Falls. Obviously, the setting is a sight to behold, but it was a local craftsman who captured the majority of our time here.

This is Donny, and he’s a bit of a wanderer. For $5, he offers to whip up something small with a bunch of coconut fronds he’s harvested and the small knife he’s trimming them with. While he starts to cut, notch, fold, and weave the pieces together, making us a bowl, we talk. He tells us of his hitchhiking adventures exploring the mainland from Texas to California. Not just that, though we stood there talking with Donny for 45 minutes, and the more we talked, the more he made until soon he had a rose mounted to the side of the basket with a butterfly taking flight and a grasshopper on the other side. Twenty minutes earlier, he insisted we didn’t owe him anything, that he was just enjoying the company and the opportunity to demonstrate his skills. All the same, we threw him a twenty and felt that we were leaving with the best Christmas gift ever.

Dinner was at The Feral Pig, and what he ate hardly mattered. Caroline was intent on continuing the umbrella drink adventure she started yesterday and went for something called a “Sazerac” made with rye whiskey, sugar syrup, Peychaud’s, and Herbsaint that was created as an absinthe substitute back when it became illegal. This potent concoction was followed by a Mai Tai that was said to follow the original recipe from 1944, when the drink was invented. Tonight’s version featured almond milk, sugar syrup, lime juice, and vodka, along with dark and light rum. Caroline left with a big silly grin on her face and a case of the giggles. This is how we spent our Christmas Eve.