Tuesday, July 12, 7:30 pm, and I'm back on the porch of the hostel facing the ocean.  Could take a picture, but it would duplicate Yesterday's picture, and so would my comments about the soothing warm breezes, so I won't repeat that.  Today I had my tour of Kauai island, and Waimeai canyon, it has the same colors, stripes, and similar shapes as the grand canyon, but it is wetter here, so there is a lot of vegetation in the nooks and crannies of the canyon, and the contrast between the reds  yellows, browns,tans, and the green vegetation makes this a dramatically vivid scene.  it is smaller, and quite a bit less wide than the big one in arizona, but quite impressive also.  We got to see it from a viewing spot on one rim that took in just about all of the canyon.  We drove in a large bus almost thirty of us from NY, MO, Germany, France, Montreal, Australia, and a few more nations.  Drove along the eastern and southern coasts, ate at a golf course club house with the Pacific at the other end of the fairway.  Had an island hamburger with a large pineapple slice and a delicious sauce on it, with non diet root beer, followed by a very delicious coconut pie, tonite I ate a small chunk of goat cheese, half a green pepper, a tomato sliced up with herbs and seasonings.  Had to compensate for that coconut pie!  Went on a short boat ride to a spiritual grotto of the original Hawaiians, drove thru small towns, saw remains of sugar cane and pineapple  processing facilities, which now are all closed for regular commercial production due to competition from other nations with much lower labor costs.  Only small, non commercial growing is done.  They are growing high grade coffee, because there are machines to harvest the beans off the low trees, so don't have to contend with the high wages of so many workers to harvest the beans.  We saw fields where the older coffee trees had been pruned back to allow the coffee picking machines to go over them, after they recover from the severe pruning and restart producing beans again next season.  The other main crop on the islands is the care and cultivation of all of we tourists.  There are housing developments going up in former pineapple and sugar cane fields.  But be warned, the prices of stand alone houses are in the seven figures, with a 2, 3,4 or 5 in front of those zeros.  Condos usually start with a 1 in front of those six zeros.  Weekly, monthly shared vacation housing per year is becoming common.  Also visited water falls, saw sites were movie or TV shows were filmed, many of them, including Thornbirds, Elvis movies, and a number of them from the fifties and sixties, as well as more recent movies.  I can't remember all of the movie names, but they were well known movies.