Saturday, August 25, 2012

Welcome to Maui.

For the most part, I journaled as we went during our trip, so much of this is written in present tense.  We have so many pictures and it was hard to pick "favorites" but I tried.  This is part one of many.  We took over 500 photos so it's hard to choose!

Day one, August 10:Flights from MSP to LAX (awful airport where we got cold food with terrible service) then LAX to OGG, Maui. We got to Maui about 9pm local time (5 hours behind MN) only to discover our luggage went to Honolulu. We filed a claim, got rental car, drove about an hour to Kahana where our hotel was.  I wish I could say we took a nice night walk on the beach or something, but it was bed time! 

Day two, August 11: 

 The view from our room at the Royal Kahana

 We got a smoothie (Ali) and coffee (Trevor) at the shop next to the hotel pool then walked around a bit until the hotel/Maui orientation and free breakfast. The concierge staff told us about places to see and things to do on the island. I didn't realize Maui is an island of Hawaii but it's also a county that includes a couple smaller islands too. Side note: I felt baby move during our orientation. Felt like little mini popcorn popping and I could see how women could dismiss it as gas but it felt different to me.  We went to get some groceries and necessities (things we needed from our checked luggage). Everything here is expensive because it's mostly shipped here. For example, a family size box of honey bunches of oats cereal was $8 and a loaf of generic wheat bread was $4. Since we still had no luggage, just one change of clothes and suits, we decided to walk the beach and hit the pool. 




Later I realized I forgot to apply sunscreen to the front of my legs but thankfully it wasn't too bad! We had lunch in our room then got more smoothies and went back to the pool. After a while we came back to the room, took a nap, then headed out for dinner. We ate at Honu Seafood & Pizza. Trevor got lobster pizza and a CoCoNut Porter (Maui Brewing Company) and I had a bacon cheeseburger and lemonade (I was so hungry I was starting to feel sick, nothing sounded good but I knew I had to eat!).

Day three, August 12: Our luggage finally came! We ate breakfast in our room, watched the Maui visitor channel for a while then headed out for a walk. We stopped at Hawaiian Village Coffee for a Kona blend and Strawberry-Banana-Mango smoothie. Both the coffee and smoothie were much better than the hotel's so we knew we'd be back. This is where I spotted the Oren Masserman CD and just had a feeling I would love the music (I later checked out his music and my instinct was right). We stopped for a little biology lesson a la Trevor along the walk.


I must admit we spent some time in the room watching Shark Week, but we're on vacation and we can do whatever we want, right? We got off our lazy butts, grabbed some smoothies from the coffee shop and walked up and down the beach as far as we could (there are areas of rock that break up the beach areas). By that time we figured out where we wanted to eat dinner and off we went. We decided on Kimo's since one of the hotel staff said they had wonderful prime rib...and they were right! We started with coconut shrimp and Cesar salads. 

 
Trevor had a Beach Blonde Ale (Maui Brewing Co again) and I had another lemonade. Not only was the food excellent, the view was spectacular! 

 
We stopped by the beach again then back to our room for more shark week-we had an early morning planned for the next day.



Once I get all the Hawaii posts done, I'll link them together at the end of each post.

Click here for Part 2, The Road to Hana, Part 3, Pearl Harbor or Part 4, Sunrise to Sunset on Maui.
-A

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...