Maui Wow-wee!

Trying to remember what we've been up to. Ok, I think I got it.

Tuesday, we went to the 'Iao Valley and saw the 'Iao Needle.

Then we drove into Lahaina (which is an old whaling town and port) and walked around. Lahaina was were my family stayed when we came to Hawaii the last time.

Mostly there is a lot of shopping there. I bought a new ring, which is "Hawaii Heirloom Style", whatever that means. I just think it looks nice. Jenn bought some stuff too.

Wednesday (Jenn's birthday) I rented snorkel gear and we went down to Makena and snorkled there. It was really nice, we saw tons of fish and to our surprise, a sea turtle. In fact Jenn and I both nearly ran into it trying to manuever around so she could get a picture. The ocean started getting a bit rough so we decided to head in.

We stopped for ice cream in Wailea, and I sent annoying text messages to Beckie about how the the weather was perfect because it had sprinkled for 2 minutes.

For dinner, we met up with Great-Uncle Tom and Great-Uncle Harry at this Japanese restaurant, Toyko Tei, which apparently owned by relatives, though I'm not sure how closely related. The food was very good.

After dinner we went back to Uncle Tom's house and we talked and he showed us his orchid farm/patch. Jenn was quite impressed by the number and size of the orchid plants. Uncle Tom let her have four plants, which she's trying to figure out how to ship back to the Mainland. Uncle Tom also told us a bunch of stories about my great-grandfather and old Hawaiians and island legends. It was very interesting.

Yesterday (Thursday), we undertook the Road to Hana. It was quite an adventure. The scenery is beautiful, and we stopped to take dozens of photos of just about every waterfall we came to. One of the waterfalls we had to climb over a bunch of rocks and up a slippery rock wall and it was kind of dangerous, but well worth it for the pictures. We also took a swim in Ching's Pond, walked on a black sand beach, walked in a lava tube, and I dipped my feet in the famous Seven Sacred Pools. After the Seven Sacred Pools we continued on around the backside of Maui, the part where rental cars are not supposed to go (shh!) and really it wasn't that bad. Still very beautiful, but in a different way.

Now when we got back, I had a bit of scare. When I plugged in my camera to offload my pictures, they were gone! Ahh! Thankfully I was able to download a program that was able to recover them. I still need to go back through and figure out what's there and then upload them to Flickr. But they are all there. Whew.

Today we're going to Kauai. Got to pack everything up and check out in a bit. Later.