Waimea Falls Audubon Center & Gardens

Today was a beautiful day here on the island! We decided early that we wanted to take our first hike. Since we haven't done any serious hiking in just over a year, I thought it best to start with an easy one, so we went to Waimea Falls. It's located on the North Shore (so close to home) right across the street from Waimea Bay.

This place used to be an Adventure Park where you could go to do extreme sports... but there was some dispute over some aspect of it all, and Honolulu County ended up selling the property to the Audubon Society... so now it's a botanical garden. LOL

It was extremely painful limiting myself to only uploading 10 pictures out of the 42 I took. But here we go.

Nikolas LOVES these birds. I don't know what they are officially called, but we all have adopted N's name of "Redheads"... this is changed from the previous name of "Rednecks". hehe I'm going to have a large print of this made to hang in his room.

This peacock followed me from the building to the car... sort of freaked me out. LOL!!

The Boy showing the Shaka... he's learning.

I took pictures of so many pretty flowers... I'm going to make a photo album in case anyone's interested in all the pictures that don't make the cut to get put here... they are still really good ones.

The walk was REALLY nice. A very easy "hike"... it was 3/4 mile each way. You could stay on an asphalt-paved road the whole way, or you could venture off onto little side paths to see a whole lot more and make the hike a little longer.

The park is trying to hold on to ancient Hawaiian culture. We saw men's and women's eating huts, they had game fields set up showing what the Hawaiians played a long time ago.

All 4 of us really enjoyed the walk and the park and the sights. There has been a ton of rain lately, so the waterfalls were very loud and rough... but when they are calmer, people are allowed to swim in the pool right under the falls!! We were disappointed that we couldn't, but we'll go back.

Island resident admission price was $5.00 each, the kids were $3.00 each and parking was $2.00 for the one car.