Glass Beach, Kauai

I'd read that there's a glass beach on Kauai and, inspired by the posts Dainty Squid and The Only Living Girl in New York have written about a different glass beach that I know I'll never see, I was determined to find it. My husband was less enthused, but we were already close (and Kauai isn't that big to begin with) so we followed the directions in my travel guide. 

We got to what was supposed to be the right spot and I was immediately distracted by the cemetery on the other side of the narrow gravel road. The stones were shaped differently than I've seen before and I almost forgot what I'd talked my husband into looking for in the first place. 

It was hard to make out much from the right side of the barbed wire fence, but the writing was Japanese and it all looked old. Later we looked it up and found out that it's the McBryde Sugar Plantation Cemetery and a local woman has been working to uncover the gravestones, which were almost completely buried in weeds until she stumbled across them. This is why I love our smartphones! We learn so much more about the places we visit than we could have in the days when our only resource was a AAA guide.

We took a few pictures through the fence and  then walked down the hill to find the beach, which is a very narrow strip that had at least a dozen people beach combing while we were there.  I didn't see any recognizable pieces of bottles, just amazing little grains of tumbled glass.

Amazing that a garbage dump can turn into something this beautiful. (And I'm sure a lot of what was swept out to sea wasn't as pretty or as inert.)