After running in debug mode for 5 minutes and continually trying to hit and open the Kibana UI, here is what I find interesting in the kibana.log.
Waiting until all Elasticsearch nodes are compatible with Kibana before starting saved objects migration. followed the suggestion from the following link:
it didn't have an effect on my system, I am still receiving the same message about Kibana not being ready.
I also see the next line of "Unable to retrieve version information from Elasticsearch nodes". Followed by the next line : Stopping all plugins", continued with "Monitoring stats collection is stopped" and \eventlog"plugin didn't stop in 30sec., move on to the next."