Driving in Kauai

For all of our fun adventures in Kauai, we also spend an amazing time riding in our car.  Luckily, it's a pretty good car, so no complaints there.  However, it does sometimes take forever to get from one place to another.  

The place we're staying is on the east coast which means that we're not super close to either the north or south shores, which is where we spent most of our time the past two days.  To get to the north shore on Tuesday, it took about an hour to get out to where we needed to be for hiking.  Even from hiking back into the nearest major town it took about 20 minutes each way.  Today, we went to a lookout towards the west shore and then to the south shore.  To go to the lookout near the west shore, it took about 2 hours.  We then drove to the south shore for surfing and after dinner made it back to our place after about half an hour.

Although none of those trips seem that bad, half of them were made at nighttime.  Sort of like NJ doesn't have any left turns, Kauai doesn't seem to have any street lights.  So, it is pitch black around you unless there is another car coming from the opposite direction to blind you with their highbeams.  It doesn't help that almost all of the roads are one lane each way either.  Although this isn't that bad, it does get annoying for traffic and at nighttime you have to pay that much more attention to what you're doing so you don't drift into the oncoming lane of traffic.

Nighttime Driving in Kauai

One last part about driving in Kauai.  For whatever reason, some of the bridges can only hold one lane of traffic at a time (one way) and therefore cannot have two lanes of traffic at a time.  This means that these one lane bridges act as their own stop signs (or traffic lights) at times.  Other times it seems like these bridges are just accidents waiting to happen.  You have to pay extra close attention when approaching one of them since you don't want to get stuck halfway and find out that another car is barreling down on you from the other side.  One of the bridges we saw spanned like 3 turns so you had to look across the river to make sure nobody was coming before you attempted the first leg of the bridge.  To me, this seems a little ridiculous - please just build a bridge that can support two lanes of traffic.

However different from DC driving it may be, at least the scenery is beautiful!