A Helicopter Tour of Kauai – Bucket List Item Number 1

You have not been to Kauai, and you haven’t taken a helicopter tour? What in blue blazes are you watching for? This needs to be on the top of each person’s bucket list. No fooling, you need to get out to the island, e-book your excursion, and take a helicopter trip around the most beautiful, enchanting, awe-inspiring location in the world. Stop studying this and speak to your travel agent now!

Okay, I’m a chunk biased; I, in reality, flew Kauai tours for numerous years, and within the hobby of full disclosure, I flew for a corporation called Air Kauai. So of the path, I have a one-of-a-kind angle on helicopters and flying around islands in them. I’m going to try to share with you, expensive reader, why it’s far that you should drop whatever different holiday plans you could have, get a price tag to Lihue, and hop aboard a tour helicopter. You can visit Orlando, or Branson, or the Catskills subsequent yr.

Here’s why you need to try this, what helicopter organization you need to don’t forget, how a whole lot it may cost a little, what to take alongside, and what time of 12 months and time of day to head. Plus a few extras: what to expect at the helicopter excursion, what you may see, a safety assessment, and other odds and ends to make your life-altering experience even extra satisfying. Let’s begin with getting to Kauai, and a bit of the island’s mystique, starting, as they say, in the beginning, the starting place of Kauai.

Kauai, or the Garden Island, is the furthest (uncovered) northwest island inside the Hawaiian chain. I say we uncovered due to the fact the Hawaiian Islands are slowly disappearing. No, this isn’t always a purpose of moving your journey up a few weeks; relax. Here’s a bit of Hawaiian trivia that some of your tour buddies possibly might not recognize. There are, in truth, 127 islands within the Hawaiian chain, no longer simply the seven you spot on a map these days–Hawaii, Maui, Molokai, Lanai, Oahu, Kauai, and Niihau. The Hawaiian chain stretches throughout the Pacific for 1 two hundred miles, ending in a tiny coral atoll referred to as Kure, that is, in truth, the very first Hawaiian Island, courting back nearly 100 million years. One of the Hawaiian Islands is a touch area called Midway which is positioned, well, mid manner across the chain, about 600 miles northwest of Oahu. All the islands are volcanic in origin.

Their supply is a volcanic rift inside the ocean floor called the Hawaiian Emperor vent, which lies deep below water seventy miles south and east of Hawaii, referred to as ‘Big Island. Over the remaining one hundred million years, this volcanic vent has created all 127 islands*. The islands smash the floor, develop into a landmass, cool sufficiently to assist lifestyles forms. Then, because of wind, water, and corrosive herbal factors, they slowly erode, sinking again below the waves. The islands are also positioned directly on a tectonic plate with a northwesterly drift, which takes them off toward Japan and Asia over their lifetimes. Each Hawaiian island sincerely moves Northwest, about half of an inch in line with the year. Geologists claim that Kure, for instance, will, in a few dozen million years, come to be parked close to the Kamchatka peninsula.