Indeed, Hanalei House is a Kennedy kind of house, with its long, rolling lawn perfect for touch football, and its deep porch on which to spend lazy afternoons. Upstairs there are rooms full of beds, sleeping porches, and bigger beds in rooms that face the sea.

We had always admired the big, red house on Hanalei Bay when we went on vacation with our family several doors down the beach for a couple of summers. So when we heard it was available by the day or week, we jumped at the chance to stay there and explore Kaua'i.

My husband and I and two other couples made our way to Kaua'i to spend the weekend. After a mid-morning flight, we drove over to Gaylord's at Kilohana just outside Lihu'e for lunch.

A grand old place, once the home of the Wilcox family, it is now a restaurant with surrounding shops for tourists. Lunch is served on the lanai with a view of the grounds in the back. Fans of old houses will love strolling around the first floor checking out the '30s details. Most of the furnishings are gone, but one large living room retains the charm of bygone times.

From there we headed for Hanalei to avoid the pau hana traffic jam for which the island is famous. We usually stop in Kapa'a and load up on groceries, but this time we just kept going. Hanalei does have a small grocery store, but the selection and prices are better in Kapa'a if you're staying in a place with a kitchen.

We zoomed past the town of Kilauea and the Princeville Resort because it started to rain. Hanalei in winter is an entirely different place than in summer.

Just after descending into the valley and before coming to town, we joined the line of cars waiting their turn to cross the old one-lane bridge. The bridge actually is two bridges, one built in 1912 and another built underneath for support, added in the late 1960s.

There is a sort of protocol about crossing the bridge. You line up on either side, and then cross in groups. It is customary to allow three to five cars to cross before the other side gets its chance. Pushy drivers can be very irritating to old-timers in the area, so do as the residents do.

Before long, we pulled into the yard of the house on Weke Road. It was stained the kind of reddish brown that was often used for plantation houses, presumably to hide the red dirt that constantly blew in from the cane fields. Around the house were huge spider-lily plants and everywhere were plumeria trees dropping yellow and white blossoms.

The deep, open front lanai was filled with comfortable, beach-worn lounge furniture, and at one end there was a picnic table and a croquet set. The cropped lawn, green from all the seasonal rain, ran longer than a football field to a palm-lined white sand beach.

This is the kind of place we used to call a "beater house" — nice enough to want to spend time in, but not too decorated, a place for sandy feet, wet bathing suits and children with sticky fingers. Almost in unison, we all sighed and relaxed. Shoes came off, suitcases were hastily dumped in bedrooms and everyone took off separately or in twos to the beach.

This house on Hanalei Bay was built in 1915 by Hans Peter Faye, who managed the Waimea Sugar Co. at the other end of the island, near Kekaha. He had five sons and three daughters and for a while, he sent them back to his native Norway, along with his wife, to get them closer to the culture in which he was raised.

When they returned to Kaua'i in 1915, as his grandson, Alan Faye Jr., tells the story, he met them at Nawiliwili with two big Cadillacs and whisked them out to the new beach house. They were awestruck, Faye recalls.

During the 1930s, Faye's father, Alan Sr., would pack up his family with their steamer trunks to spend three months at Hanalei in the summer. Along with them came a four-person koa outrigger canoe, a 16-foot sailboat and a small skiff with an outboard motor.

It was a dream world. A Hawaiian from Ha'ena named John Hanohano Pa took on legendary proportions for the young boy. Pa came each year to help the family lash the old outrigger and one summer, when Faye Jr. was only 3, he taught him to swim "the old Hawaiian way."

"He threw a piece of dried hau bush (light, like balsa wood) into the water. He then threw me into the water and told me to swim over to the hau and hold on. 'Be sure to hold your breath.' he said. In those days, you either sank or swam."

The lanai of the big red house was always filled with Hawaiians living in the area. They would come to talk story, dance hula, play 'ukulele, eat and plan fishing trips, Faye says.

Hukilaus in Hanalei Bay were legendary. They were the real thing, he says, not something cooked up for tourists. Nets were laid across much of the huge bay. In front of the house was a large wooden turnstile with a crank, a capstan. The crank would pull the nets almost into shore and then the people on the beach would huki them in, filled with fish, which was shared with everyone.

The war years saw activity on the bay come to a halt. The beaches were covered with barbed wire so thick you could hardly see through it. Soon the barbed wire rusted and children began cutting and poking themselves on wire buried in the sand.

Hanalei House is a Kennedy kind of house, with its long, rolling lawn perfect for touch football, and its deep porch on which to spend lazy afternoons. Upstairs there are rooms full of beds, sleeping porches, and bigger beds in rooms that face the sea.In 1957, a tsunami pushed the house off the beach and back about 25 feet to where it now sits. Much of the first floor was modernized in the course of repairing the damage. Since the 1980s, the family has rented the house to friends and visitors. It has become a favorite place for weddings at sunset.

Hukilau on Hanalei Bay were legendary, with huge nets cast to bring in plenty of fish for everyone. Kaui Philpotts • The Honolulu Advertiser

Our first morning in Hanalei, it drizzled, so we abandoned our plans to go kayaking on the river, something we had promised a friend we would do. Instead, the men went to Princeville to play golf, and the women piled into the rental car and headed to the old lighthouse at Kilauea, now preserved and a national bird sanctuary.

We stopped for lunch, poked around Kong Lung Center and headed home to relax. Later that afternoon, we took a leisurely drive to Ha'ena to see the Limahuli Garden, now a National Tropical Botanical Garden, and a good place to see native plants co-existing with introduced species. You can take yourself on a self-guided tour of the garden past the lo'i filled with kalo, the 'ulu (breadfruit) trees, ti leaves (ki), fiddlehead fern (hoi'o) and wauke.

The tour will take you most of an hour and is well worth the time, if only for the breathtaking views of the ocean and the fresh air. Along the way you can view Makana mountain, one of only two places in the Islands where traditional Hawaiians performed the 'oahi ceremony. They threw flaming spears off the cliffs into the ocean at night on special occasions, like the graduation of hula students nearby in Ha'ena. Updrafts kept the burning spears in the air and they drifted out to sea as far as a mile, creating quite a spectacle.

It's fun to explore, but Hanalei and the big red house are not for nonstop activity. They are for reading, napping, talking, playing music and restoring yourself. Even then, the slow-paced days go by much too fast. A weekend is nothing. You want a week, or two weeks.