We were so excited for this trip. Everyone loves Maui....it seems to be most peoples favorite island.
My wonderful, thoughtful, selfless Mother, flew out to watch (more like entertain...more in a post to come) my children for 8 days while Shad and I headed off across the ocean. I feel so blessed that I have a Mother who is capable and willing to do this for us. Not to mention my kids can't get enough of her.
We headed out and it was wonderful. Even the drive to the airport and the plane ride was wonderful. It's so peaceful traveling without children. I got to buy my guilty-pleasure celebrity magazines and read them cover to cover while eating candy on the plane, with a nice cozy fleece blanket over me. We rented a movie player on the plane....pretty cool. It was$15 and had a variety of movies to choose from and 2 headsets. We had plenty of time to watch 2 full movies. Then we arrived in beautiful Oahu and jumped on another plane to Maui. Ross and Lillie arrived a couple of hours before us. We met up at the resort and headed out to get burgers. We did not diet or even remotely eat healthy on this vacation. Burgers, fries, dessert every night (and throughout the day...who am I kidding), fish tacos, etc. We flew through several boxes of chocolate covered macadamia nuts. Needless to say, my clothes are a bit on the tight side right now. But it was all worth it.
Back on track....we ate burgers that night. It was so wonderful just to eat and visit into the evening.
The next morning I went on my one and only run. My plan was to run every other day in preparation for this. And it was really beautiful to run a long the ocean in 75 degree weather instead of 95 degree weather. But it just didn't happen. Sleep won out.
We took a two day journey on the Road to Hana. It's the one thing everyone says you have to do on Maui. Our first stop was in Paia...I could have stayed there the whole trip. A cute little beach town that was full of locals and they had the best healthfood store (that Shad said smelled funny..."why do all healthfood stores stink?" direct quote from Shad).
It's always nice to travel with Lille and Ross, besides the fact that we love them dearly, Lillie is a professional photographer....which is a really nice added bonus.
Here are some pictures of the town:
5 images above, via Lillie's blog
I'm not sure why, but in our other trips to Hawaii, we never got any shaved ice. Shad has complained about this for years. He finally got some.
We finally decided to take the top down on our rental jeep, because it was so beautiful outside on the road to Hana and traveling along the ocean...
and then it rained literally 3 minutes later. We all just busted up laughing. We road in the sprinkling rain, past sundown, and in the darkness until we reached our next stop, the YMCA...sounds funny I know. Read on.
We happened to meet this really cool couple that runs the YMCA on the other side of Maui (on the Road to Hana) and told us that we could get a cool deal there for a "room" that slept 4. It turned out to be a 2 bedroom cabin with a porch overlooking the ocean and a gorgeous tropical jungle. And it was so cheap!
Our cabin:
Our view from the porch:
Then we headed to Hana. They say it's the journey not the destination with Hana. I think we took that a little too seriously, because it took us a long time to get to Hana.
We saw the prettiest areas we ever seen. And being from Oregon, and completely snobby about how pretty it is there, that's saying a lot. It was gorgeous. The pictures won't do it justice. It was amazing. It felt like you were in a tropical rainforest/jungle/beach. It was amazing. Lush green trees, tropical fruit growing wild everywhere you looked, a million billion mosquitos lovely wildlife, and waterfalls galore. I've never seen so many waterfalls in such close proximity to eachother.
We hiked everywhere with our swim suits on underneath so we could jump in the waterfalls or ocean when we felt like it. The first waterfalls we hiked to, Shad and I were about 10 minutes ahead (because we are soooo in shape....yeah not really, Lillie stopped to take pictures on the trail). Anyway, it was so cool because there was no one in sight when we got there. There were three waterfalls landing into a pool of water, with the lushest greenery all around us. We stripped down to our suits and jumped in. It was magical. It was so cool swimming under waterfalls with Shad. I kept saying to Shad, "I feel like we're on the Bachelor on a date" because it was like that. One of those crazy cool dates you see that they go on and you think, "that's not real life."
We past several little fruit stands that were "on your honor" with no one around. They were so cute.
Shad was obsessed with the wild fruit. And obsessed is putting it lightly. It could be his obsession that made the Road to Hana so incredibly long, because he stopped every 1/2 mi and would exclaim, "do you see that? Guava/passion fruit/coconuts/banana/mango/avocado!! (whatever it was he saw at that moment...we picked and ate all of those). He picked so much fruit. Then when we'd get to the resort at night, he'd cut it all up and put it on a platter to serve us. It cracked us up. But he wasn't trying to be funny. He was in heaven with all of the free tropical fruit.
Here is the black sand beach. I gotta admit it was dissappointing. I was expecting black sand. It was a bunch of black rocks. No sand in sight. Still pretty though.
That evening we hiked to a really high waterfall. We had to hike through a bamboo forest and Lillie kept joking that we were on Dora. "Hike past the tree, through the bamboo forest and to the waterfall!" I think the four of us have watched way too much Nick Jr in the past 6 years. BUT the bamboo forest was crazy cool. We all loved it.
Shad surfing on a paddle board.
More to come. I haven't gotten the images from Lillie's camera yet.