Day 5 Sunday, July 27th
Kahului, Maui

Many mornings on the ship, including this first one, went like this. I would wake up, make a cup of coffee, sit on our balcony as we came into port and read. Most ports that the ship pulled into were not that appealing, they were basically merchant ship docks. When Rachel awoke, we would go to the Aloha Café for the breakfast buffet. Rachel would get her fresh fruit, yogurt, and cereal. I would have my eggs, bacon, sausage, French toast, pancakes, or whatever else they had to pack some weight on. I would also have fresh fruit; it was too good to pass up.

After breakfast, we left the ship to with the plans to rent a car to head to Lahaina for the day. It’s funny how plans change. First of all, we were told there was public transportation that would take us to Lahaina and with me being the cheap guy that I am, I thought that was a much better idea than renting a car. Unfortunately for us, this was not exactly the case. There was public transportation all right, it was just impossible to find and only left every hour. We wandered around looking for it and found it about five minutes after it had left. So, with my tail between my legs, we went back to the ship and boarded one of the shuttles that took us to a rental car facility at the nearby airport. Kahului is not quite what I had thought of when I thought of Maui. The port and the airport are just about the only visible reason why there is a city there. After boarding the shuttle, the driver said to us, “I hope you are not trying to drive to Lahaina, there was an accident on the only road that goes there. The back up is about 5 hours.”

Plan B. We rented a car with Avis and throughout our trip, we had the BEST experience with this company. I would highly recommend them. We tried renting with Hertz on the Big Island and they didn’t have any cars despite giving us a reservation (classic Seinfeld scene). There were other people were having the same problem as us. We canceled our reservations with Hertz, went next door to Avis and did fine.

Anyway, we decided to head south to Kihei and Wailea. We were going to be getting up VERY early in the morning for the sunrise on Haleakala and wanted to take it easy, so we planned to go to the beach for some relaxation and sightseeing. We ended up at the beach right in front of Grand Wailea Resort and the Four Seasons in Wailea. It was a beautiful beach (is there any other type on Hawaii?) with some fun waves. It did get a little windy which made our decision to depart early a little easier.

After the beach, we headed south on a narrow road toward Makena. A pseudo-local (transplanted from New Jersey) that we met at the beach told us that it was a nice ride and it takes you through the last active lava flow on Maui. It was great; we saw fields full of pumice, great views of Molokini (a crescent shaped island off the coast), and we experienced some of the unequaled Hawaiian hospitality.

We had pulled over on the side of the road in order to take some pictures along the coast. There were a couple of locals fishing right next to us. As I set the camera up, one of them came over and offered to take our picture. We gratefully accepted and he took the pictures of us that you see here. In one of the pictures, you can see Molokini behind us. If memory serves me correctly, the local told us that Molokini was a military site where they used to test weaponry. He then gave us a mango that he had picked that morning to take home with us. Not quite the treatment you get from strangers in Massachusetts, or just about anywhere else for that matter. That was a great note to end our day on, so we headed back to the ship for an early dinner and bedtime before our trip up to the top of the island.

Post trip comment: Many people have already asked us about why we skipped the road to Hana. Our feeling was that we really wanted to do the sunrise on Haleakala and that the road to Hana would have taken up too much time for only being there a day and a half.