A 25th Wedding Anniversary In Paradise Part 2

Having gotten to Maui and acquired our rental car, all that was left to do was to start enjoying our vacation.  The only problem was: it was almost 2:00 a.m. local time (or 7 a.m. to us) and we were dead tired, so instead we headed to bed!

The next morning, we finally got to check out the view from our hotel room in the daylight:

Not bad!

Then we headed out for breakfast at the nearby Beach House at the Sands of Kahana, about a 3-minute walk away, and after that did a grocery run.  Our hotel room was nicely set up with a full kitchen: fridge, stove, oven, microwave and toaster.  This allowed us to eat every subsequent breakfast "at home" as well as a handful of lunches once we'd stocked up.

We didn't do a whole lot more that first Wednesday in Maui, other than exploring the area, eating meals and watching some of the US primaries coverage on TV (this was the day after Super Tuesday).  We were still pretty tired from the 24 hours of travel and hassle the previous day.

On Thursday, though, we began a routine of getting up early and finding a beach to enjoy.  This would be our pattern for the rest of the stay, sometimes exploring new beaches and other times returning to ones we'd already hit.  Vicki kept track of the number of different beaches we got to and it was up to almost a dozen by the time we were packing up on March 15th.  Our favourite ones were always wherever the biggest waves could be found, and there were several of thoseL Napili, DT Fleming and the Big Beach at Makena.

    

As you can sort of see in the videos, Vicki enjoyed body surfing on those big waves while I was more the "stand where they break and have them crash over you, tossing you around like a straw in a hurricane" type.  We both had a ton of fun though,, and our beach mornings were always the highlight of each day.

Oh, and that "getting up early" approach started innocently enough, with us going to bed early on that first Wednesday and then waking up around 5 a.m. the next day.  However, it soon dawned on us that there were several advantages to staying on that schedule - not only could we remain on an Ontario timetable which might reduce the jet lag when we got home, but the beaches were much less crowded in the morning than they were later in the day.  And with the kind of temperatures we were getting, it tended to be perfect on the beach until about noon, after which things would usually get hot.  Once we realized that, we stuck with going bed before 9 p.m. and getting up between 5 and 6 each morning.