Hawaii Diaries #10 - Kauai Escape Room and Our Last Full Day in Kauai

We did the Kauai Escape Room.

It was our last day in Kauai and we wanted to take it easy. This whole trip has been filled with excursions so our last day was meant to be relaxing.

We started with breakfast at home while the wife finished the puzzle. It was a team effort since I put two pieces in at the beginning!

One piece was missing but 503/504 pieces ain’t bad!

The Kauai Escape Room was at noon in the southern part of the island; it was about an hour trek from Princeville.

On the way, we stopped at a farmer’s market and picked up some rambutan; the weird hairy fruit.

The cool thing about Kauai is that there are farmer’s markets pretty much every day. This one was a pretty big one with at least a dozen stands. We’ve already tried starfruit and dragon fruit so I was eager to try another weird fruit; even if looked like a hairy red ball.

While there, we also got a sugarloaf pineapple frosty. The sugarloaf pineapple is a Kauai specific fruit; a white sweet pineapple. The frosty is made pushing the frozen pineapple through a juicer and it creates an ice cream like frozen treat.

It was quite delicious.

The Kauai Escape Room is in Lihue so we headed there after the market.

We’re big fans of escape rooms having done around a dozen in the last few years. If you’ve never done one, it’s generally a themed room with a goal. Your group gets locked in this room, solves puzzles, open locks and try to either get out or meet an end goal.

The one we did was tiki themed, very apt for Hawaii. The cool thing about this one is that you can book the full room for just the two of us. It costs more per person if it’s just the two of you but we were happy to do that if it meant not being placed in a room with strangers.

Our goal was to stop a volcano from exploding and killing everyone on the island! The room design was solid and the puzzles inventive. It wasn’t just all locks with codes but included cool mechanics that opened doors or hidden compartments.

I won’t go into details as to not spoil anything. However, I’ll say the room was a lot better than I expected given the location. The best rooms I’ve played have been in major population centers so it was nice to see a good one on this small island.

There’s a really cool twist in the end and some major creativity that I haven’t seen in other rooms. The puzzles are all theme relevant and the ending really rocks. We were able to finish with about 8 minutes left and enjoyed our time here.

Total thumbs up here if you’re a fan of escape rooms at all.

Gaylord’s at Kilohana was our destination for lunch. Kilohana is a sprawling sugar plantation estate that has a few stores, a restaurant and even train rides. We spent a few minutes walking around the area and checked out the stores; mostly Hawaiian trinkets.

The restaurant has nice courtyard seating and a small lunch menu.

The lunch wasn’t too bad. We both had a short rib sandwich with a nice horseradish spread.

We stopped at Kapa’a on the way back, walked around a bit, did some shopping and stopped for shave ice at Wailua Shave Ice.

There’s so many damn shave ice places on this island! It’s impossible to try them all but I definitely recommend the ones that use fresh fruit syrups

The fresh pineapple strawberry shave ice we had was solid. I’d rank it third of the ones I had.

After this, we got home and started packing.

I popped open some rambutan to try it. It’s pretty easy to eat – cut a little line down the middle of the peel and pop out the inner fruit.

There is a big seed inside the fruit. You take that out or eat around it.

The fruit is pretty good with flavor reminiscent of a grape. I’d say it’s less impressive than the dragon fruit or the star fruit as those have a more unique flavor. The rambutan also looks weird.

We started to pack while we ate the fruit knowing that our time on Kauai was coming to an end.

Overall, this has been an awesome visit to the island. We started with a lot of excursions then relaxed more in the northern part of the island.

If I had to pick one, then the south is definitely the place to be right now due to all the closures in the north. However, the north is definitely worth seeing as well.

We’ve got a few days in Maui up next but I’m not sure that can top Kauai. It’s been such an awesome stay!