Aloha!!

Wow. I am a lot better at blogging about nothing than I am at blogging about something. Something like, say, the MAJOR-TIME AWESOME summer event of the YEAR. No, the decade, rather. Our trip to

HAWAII

which started with a long drive to the Las Vegas airport in our close to 20 year old, AC-less Toyota Camry (long, uninteresting story as to how that happened), which seemed bearable at the time but we were really kicking ourselves driving for 3 hours in the July noon-day sun on the way back. (Details include me going into a convenience store bathroom, taking my shirt off and soaking it in the sink, then putting it back on. My face was beet red the whole way back. [I just wanted to tell that part of the story now so that we can end on a good note]) followed by a long wait, a long flight, another long wait, a really long flight, a short drive, and crashing straight into bed in Maui.

Then we woke up early the next morning (and when I say early I mean 3:45, 4-ish) and lounged around for 5 hours, then headed to the

BEACH

And we were pretty excited:



So after a short drive of this:

We ended up roughly, here:


Ahhhh, yeah.

And to be honest I don't remember the exact order we did things in after that, but here's a picture of me before we went to dinner one of those nights. Another reminder to stand up straight or I'll end up with a hunchback:

We went to a happenin' restaurant in Paia called the Paia Fish Market. Don't know if you heard about this big news a while ago, pretty crazy:

We drove and hiked a little bit in the Iao National Park. It was really pretty.



And we had heard tell that watching the sunrise on top of Mount Haleakala was an event not to be missed. So again, we got up early. Maybe 4:30 this time, and drove the hour long drive up the mountain. I can't remember the elevation and I usually embarrass myself when I try to guess by saying like 25,000 feet or something ridiculous. But it was high enough that we were just above the clouds. And it was COOOOLD. But we had fair warning from friends that it would be cold so we brought quilts. We saw many others who were not so fortunate in t=shirts and shorts. That's a shame. Here we are just before the sun peeked over the clouds.

Wow. A picture really doesn't do it justice, but you can imagine seeing this view in a much more panoramic and real-life view.




The road back down the mountain

One of my favorite events was the Old Lahaina Luau, it was so fun! They did dancing and told stories of their heritage, it was all-you-can-eat gourmet Hawaiian food and open bar, which you still pay for even if you don't drink :(, and it was just a good, good time. The Hawaiian people are so friendly and good at bringing others into their culture.



We took a 2-day trip to Hana, the other side of Maui. The side we stayed on was more dry and deserty, but the road to Hana was another world. We couldn't stop ourselves from taking a hundred pictures. I'll just give a few highlights.







Our sweet ride. Did I mention that we stayed in the home of a woman James baptized on his mission, and she was traveling on the mainland at the time? Well, we did. And we also used her nice car. She was so generous. We camped in the back of this car on our Hana road trip.



My personal quest on this trip was to get a cool picture of one of the beat-up curvy road signs with the green scenery flashing on the sides.


But as you can see, you rarely go above 15 miles an hour on this road because it is so curvy. Lots of people get sick so we brought a ginger root to suck on, which helped. There were waterfalls everywhere right next to the road, and lots of one-lane bridges where you have to yield to oncoming traffic. It was a real adventure!


More views stepping out of the car:





This part is out of order, but at the end of our Hana trip we visited the Seven Sacred Pools, which were so refreshing after swimming in salt water for a week. They are fresh and cold, and each pool empties into a lower one and then finally out into the ocean, seen here:

James cliff jumped where that man is standing. The water is pretty deep.


This was a crazy tree we saw where it would just send roots straight down out of the branches 10 or 20 feet down into the ground. Crazy tree.


This is Hamoa Beach, one of our favorites and very secluded because it's on the less-populated side of the island where Hana is.

Our spot:

We discovered a few games on the i-phone while there:

Enjoying a passion fruit from a local fruit stand:

Wish you could see where we are really parked in this picture. Here's the story and I'll try to make it short. The fruit stand where we got the passion fruit. The lady who runs the stand talked to us for a few minutes and found out we were LDS. So she sent us down the street for lunch at the home of one of the few LDS families in the area. They run a plate lunch business in their front yard. We went and ate lunch there, and they invited us to a ward potluck that night. That was fun! Then they found out we were camping, and called their friend who has property right on the ocean to see if we could camp in her yard. She agreed, and in this picture, our car is backed up against a cliff edge, maybe 15 feet away, and we slept in the back of the car listening to the sound of the ocean all night. And I mean all night, because I didn't get much sleep what with the bugs and all. But it was incredible.

Hana

Red sand beach! (We saw a nudist here, te hee hee!)



The plate lunch place I mentioned before at the home of the LDS family:


Black sand beach!

On the black sand beach there was this cool cave that you enter from the side I'm standing on to take the picture, and it opens up right where the ocean tumbles in. But mostly I just thought James looked so handsome in this picture, which was why I included it.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Paradise.


If you still check my blog these days, thanks for having faith in me. Hopefully now that I have this post off the to-do list I'll feel more excited about going back to blogging about nothing.

Out.