Some places earn their meaning over time. Kaua’i is one of those places for me.
My first trips here weren’t holidays in the traditional sense. They were family gatherings. My dad’s extended family, coming together in Po’ipu the way families do when they sense that time is starting to move faster than it used to. My grandfather, colloquially referred to as Papa Pete amongst family, friends and the Chico community had a way of making things happen, like somehow get a sprawling extended family to pause their lives and show up somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. What I think he understood was that the slower pace of the island wasn’t just a backdrop. It was the point. Kaua’i has a way of making you put down whatever you were carrying and pay attention to what was right in front of you.
Papa Pete was that kind of man. A professor at Chico State, he had a telescope at the ready and a patience for wonder that I’ve never quite found in anyone else. During summer visits the two of us, would sit outside with root beer floats and look up at the stars. He’d point out the North Star and tell me that whenever I saw it, wherever I was in the world, he’d be looking at it too. It was his way of saying that distance doesn’t break the things that matter. It means even more now, being in Australia.
He’s gone now. But I still look up.
The Engagement: Falling in Love with Poipu
When it came time to propose, I think that there was never really a question of where. Kaua’i already felt like ours before it officially was. There’s something about an island that holds memory differently than a city does. Every visit layers on top of the last, and we had so much to build upon. It starts to feel familiar. You know which beach to go to at what time of day. You know that the trade winds pick up in the afternoon (much to my wifes dismay) and that the evenings are worth staying up for.
I’m pretty sure we said yes to Kaua’i before we said yes to each other.
The Wedding: When 40 Became 100
The plan, at least for me, was always to get married here. It was always at the top of my list. We just didn’t anticipate was how many people would agree that Kaua’i was worth the trip.
It was supposed to be small. Forty people, maybe. Intimate. But somewhere between the save-the-dates and the final headcount, the guest list took on a life of its own. My family from across the United States and my wife’s from Australia. Friends who chose Hawai’i without hesitation. By the time we walked toward that white gazebo at the Grand Hyatt Kaua’i, nearly a hundred people were watching.
I don’t think either of us minded. In fact, it was humbling.
Four years on, I took a photo of the gazebo that hosted us that day. It’s a simple metal structure, but it moved me the same way it did on the day I married my beautiful wife. In a way that doesn’t make sense but yet so human in nature.
Through the Telescope
Between the telescope and the root beer floats, Papa Pete had taught me that some things don’t need to be grandiose to be felt. On those family vacations, he’d watch the family come together and appreciate that, despite all the challenges life presented him with, he was still responsible for all of this. Kids playing in the water; the laughter; the smiles. The wedding was a way of planting a flag. Even before I proposed to my beautiful wife, I knew this place meant something, even if I didn’t know why. I guess that, sometimes, what is right in front of you, makes you realise that what IS right in front of you, matters. Even if you don’t realise it at the time.
The Family Trip: The Sunrise I Didn’t Know I Needed
Travelling with a one-year-old and a four-year-old is not a holiday in the conventional sense. It is logistically complex, chaotic, and required a tolerance for early mornings that no amount of parenting experience fully prepares you for.
Our eldest, four years old at the time and wired for an early morning no matter where we are in the world, woke me before sunrise on one of our first mornings. Admittedly, I wasn’t thrilled. I had been looking forward to sleeping past six for the better part of a year.
But down we went. Down to the Shipwreck Beach, just the two of us, while my wife and daughter slept. He sat in the sand looking out at the ocean, still in the way that kids occasionally do when something has genuinely caught their attention. The sky went from dark to deep orange to gold. The sun cracked over the rocks at the edge of the bay and flooded everything with that particular Hawaiian light that can’t be adequately explain to anyone who hasn’t seen it. I’m a father first, of course, but this moment brought out the photographer in me, because I didn’t know what else to do with a moment that felt too large to just stand beside.
It’s one of my favourite photographs. Not technically. It was instinctive rather than deliberate, but that’s because it wasn’t. Instead, it captured something I didn’t fully understand until much later, looking back at it. A small boy, back to the camera, watching the Pacific with the kind of attention that only children seem capable of.
And then there’s me, standing behind the lens, in a place that Papa Pete first brought our family to.
I didn’t make the connection that morning. I was still half asleep. But somewhere in that photograph, Papa Pete is there too. In the stillness of it. He’s in the reason that we’ve kept coming back to this particular stretch of ocean on this particular island in the middle of the Pacific. He introduced me to this island paradise. In the belief, which he carried and passed on without ever making a speech about it, that the effort of bringing people together in a place that slows you down is never wasted.
He would look at that photo and understand it immediately, and then we’d have a root beer float.
That morning, Kaua’i added another layer.
Standing at the Gazebo Again
Part of that trip was going back to the gazebo that started it all. Of course we did.
This time there were four of us, both kids restless which didn’t really allow for that perfect photo that I was looking for. But that didn’t matter. We captured the structure, the same ocean in the background, and the same quality of light that seems to exist only in Kaua’i in the late afternoon.
Except we were different people standing in it. We were now the couple who got engaged here and had two beautiful children. We were the couple whose wedding grew to almost a hundred people. The people standing in that gazebo now carry all of these memories.
That’s what Kaua’i does. It stays the same while you change. It holds the record of who you were each time you showed up. And if you’re lucky, and you keep coming back, you start to see the shape of your own life reflected in a place that never asked anything of you except to slow down and pay attention.
Papa Pete believed always looked to the heavens with a sense of wonder and a awareness that this world was bigger than the sum of us all. Kaua’i is, in many ways, my north star. The same guiding light that he showed me during those nights in Chico. In a way, he is reason I’ve kept coming back to this island with my own family. It was Bryce sitting in the sand at Shipwreck Beach watching the Pacific at sunrise.. He just pointed at the North Star and let me figure out the rest.
"Second to the right, and straight on till morning." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
By the way, looking up pays dividends. Thank you for the guidance, Papa Pete.
