Hawaii (Maui) Vacation
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Black Sands Beach (Day 5)Originally uploaded by charsplat.
I’ve been meaning to post on our Hawaii trip for a week now. I guess now is as good a time as any.
From Sept 9th through Sept 16th Anji and I went to Hawaii. The kids stayed home and were watched by our families (thanks again everyone).
We had an incredible time and our days were jammed full with all sorts of fun stuff. I also took a couple thousand photos of which I’ve printed 300 and posted 10 to flickr. I’ll post more soon.
We spent our first 3 days staying in the Pioneer Inn in Lahaina. It was right in the middle of Front St. and right on the harbour. All sorts of interesting restaurants and shops in easy walking distance.
We arrived in Hawaii at 2pm, picked-up our rental car, and drove to our hotel (although due to a grass fire we were delayed a fair bit). We spent a few hours wandering around the town and then went for dinner at “Bubba Gumps”. That evening we headed off to “A Taste of Lahaina” which was a festival type thing with local bands and food samplings from local restaurants.
Our second day consisted almost entirely of the trip to Haleakala (the volcano on Maui). We actually hiked in fairly close to the bottom of the crater dispite the warning signs to pregnant women and people with asthma (high altitudes and desert-like conditions). Very, very cool hike and gorgeous scenery.
Our 3rd day was mostly wandering Lahaina, the beach and in the evening we went to a Luau at the Hyatt. The food at the Luau was incredible! The funny thing with the Luau was that when we got back to our hotel Anji found a video camera in our car that wasn’t ours. We were quite confused at the time, but finally we tracked down the owner and found out the real story. Apparently they had rented a similar vehical and after the Luau walked up to ours by accident. Unfortunately for them I forgot to lock the car so they got right in, sat down, and then realized it wasn’t their car. They were all embarrased and left, forgetting the camera. A funny story after the fact but unfortunately they were without their camera for about 3 day.
On our 4th day we switched hotels to a condo type thing in Kihei. On the drive over we stopped at the Iao Needle (really really tall piece of rock that makes the Drumheller hoodoo’s look rather small in comparison) and the “Tropical Plantation” tour. Dinner was at “Cheese Burger, Island Style” which came highly recommended but we found it was expensive and not particularly good. Certainly not even close to the same league of burger as the “Holy Grill” here in Calgary.
Our 5th day was the road to Hana. Hana is a little town that isn’t very interesting but the road itself is incredibly scenic, windy and just plain nuts. It took us many many hours to get there because there are many stops along the way with short hikes, beautiful views, etc. I took about 400 photos on that drive. There were roughly 50 one-way bridges on the way to Hana and most of them with poor visibility of oncoming traffic. I drove the whole thing and it was pretty exciting. We got back to Kehai just in time for dinner.
The 6th day was started by a huge buffet breakfast at the nearby Marriott. The rest of the day was mostly hanging out at the beach.
The 7th day in Hawaii was actually Anji’s Birthday. We spent more time at the beach and then in the evening finished up with a very nice sunset dinner cruise.
We hit the beach on the 8th day for one last swim before packed up and headed for the airport.
It was really much more exciting than that all sounded. Some of the most enjoyable bits for me were the evening walks along the ocean, the volcano hike, the luau and dinner cruise. All very nice. We certainly would have had a great time with the kids but our days were so much fuller when we didn’t have to wait for them to have breakfast, pack the diaper bag, nap times, screaming at dinner time, bed at 7:30pm sort of thing.
The photoset is here on flickr.
All 300 photos we thought were worth printing are here.
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