Our trip to Hawaii

M and I took a vacation in early October to Maui. We received a lei greeting when we arrived at the airport and then headed over to get our Jeep Wrangler we rented for the week. Then we drove the hour drive to our hotel on the other side of the island.



Maui is a beautiful island and we explored most of it. We started with a drive to the top of Haleakala Volcano to watch the sunrise over the crater. It is a long and windy drive along the cliffside. It was very cold up at the top...10,000+ feet up. But the sun rising over the clouds and crater was worth it!



We did a lot of snorkeling at the beach down from our hotel. We also took the Four Winds II boat out to Molokini Crater for what is said to be the best snorkeling spot. The boat ride was really fun and we were fed lots of good food. Molokini Crater had lots of fish to swim with including a shark and squid that the snuba divers got to see.





Of course we went to a Lu'au. We saw Drums of the Pacific at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The food was really good and so was the entertainment. There was a fashion show, many dances, and a fire thrower. Very entertaining.




I had to go to the Maui Ocean Center. I really like aquariums and the one in Maui had lots of things I had never seen before. They even several underwater tunnels to walk through. They have scuba divers who go down at certain times to feed and play with the array of sharks, fish, and stingrays. It was really fun.




Our last adventure for the trip was the Drive to Hana. It is a 58 mile snaky, windy, very narrow old highway that has many one lane bridges and is right on the edge of a cliff. It was a beautiful drive that has many waterfalls to look at. Towards the end there is Haleakala National Park that has three waterfalls and three pools of water to swim in. It is very serene. Our whole trip this day took 12 hours round trip for a 58 mile drive. Maybe that gives you an idea of how slow we were going. There were very few places where it was safe to drive over 30 mile an hour. But that was actually nice because it gave us plenty of chances to admire the rain forest around us.

The winding Hana Highway.

Ohe'o Gulch or better known as The Seven Sacred Pools even though there are only three.




The rugged north coast of Maui, near Nakalele Point.