Hiking to Pfeiffer Falls and Valley View

Kevin was so great about letting me stop along the way and take pictures. The trees are huge -- easily 1,000-to 1500 years old.  What a great time...even if some tourists wanted to stay with us, rest with us, hike with us -- and talk non-stop along the way.  We stopped and shopped a little in Carmel before heading home. We decided to try a new restaurant for dinner and scored big time -- Rangoli's Indian Restaurant in San Jose was delicious.  On Sunday, Ashley, Kevin and I tried Mint Leaf in Saratoga for lunch -- another delicious meal.  I told Kevin I didn't want to make my birthday all about eating -- hmmm.

Na 'Aina Kai

Wednesday we went to Na ‘Aina Kai Botanical Gardens. Joyce Dody, the former wife of Charles Schulz (creator of Peanuts cartoons) and her husband have created an incredible garden of tropical flowers and trees.

We went on the 5 hour walking tour and amazingly Kevin enjoyed it. We walked through the hardwood plantation (they’ve planted 60,000 teak trees, plus mahogany, rosewood, etc.) to help support the gardens in the future.

The second photo is a picture of a pair of "nene." Down by the beach we saw 11 nene – they were almost extinct (down to just 30 birds) in the 1970s. (They are a cousin of the Canada goose.) Today they estimate that there are about 1500 birds.

The third photo is a banana tree -- notice the tiny clump of bananas and the long "flower" with the purple tip. It's a pretty cool flower. You can tell when the grower has allowed the bananas to ripen on the tree by how round the bananas are -- the more octagonal the earlier they were picked.

I loved the beautiful jade blossoms (above)-- the blue jade was bizarre. I loved seeing the carnivore flowers (bug-eating flowers with trap doors that lure bugs in and then the flower eats them) and the view of the beach from the gazebo was fabulous.

A great and exhausting tour.

We walked down to the Hyatt and enjoyed the evening from the Terrace restaurant. As we walked home it started to rain—and then really rain. It’s fun how it’s warm rain so it really doesn’t matter.

Bike ride

We went for a bike ride today and the weather was gorgeous -- a bit nippy but billowy clouds, blue skies and lots of trees fully in bloom.