Grove Farms Museum
Grove Farms Museum

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Locator Map: A white rectangle denotes an area just inland from the southeastern shore of the island of Kauai.
 This was one of the best places we visited in Hawaii. They provided an excellent tour of the plantation grounds, including the tidy little home of the plantation's Japanese laundress, the plantation infirmary set up by a daughter of the owner after World War I, the main house, its gardens, and a little house called "the bachelor pad", which was the owner's retreat from his wife and family. Without asking, they paired us off with our own tour guide so Maria coul have a tactile tour. The guide let Maria explore and touch things that are normally off-limits. The guide was excited; she said we gave her an opportunity to finally see some things, such as the insides of desks, dressers, and closets, that she'd always wanted to investigate. The tour ended with a visit to the kitchen, where a Japanese cook served mint tea grown in the garden, and excellent little sugar cookies made with unrefined turbinado sugar and baked in the kitchen's wood stove. Unfortunately, flash photos weren't allowed, so I couldn't get pictures of the most interesting stuff inside the buildings.
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Beyond a vast expanse of lawn, a broad, low green roof topping a dark structure extends outward from the left of a higher, more grand building that is mostly obscured by a huge thick-leafed monkeypod tree.
The main plantation house at Grove Farms. The interior of the two-story structure
on the left is grandly ornate and its many rooms are expensively furnished, but
the dense foliage surrounding most of its sides makes picture-taking tough. The
low green roof tops the separate kitchen facilities, which are connected to
the main house by a roofed lanai.

Miniature green bananas hang downward from the top of a banana tree, surrounding and gripping the broad end of a purple, tear-shaped pod like fingers holding an egg.
Young bananas forming in a banana "tree" at Grove Farms.

A carved stone arched bridge and small oriental lantern mark the entrance to a Japanese garden lush with green palms and tropical plants.
A Japanese garden somewhere behind the main plantation house.

A craggy hill, dark green with vegetation, rises against a grey, cloudy sky beyond the forested rim of a deep gorge.
A view from the edge of a deep forested gorge, probably an ancient volcanic crater.

Against a misty-blue, shimmering backdrop of mountains, a ramshackle white house perches precariously on stilts on the rim of a palm-draped gorge.
Another view across the same gorge (though this picture has been "tweaked" quite
a bit).

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