Saturday....already?

Much higher surf means no snorkeling for us...big bummer since Bob's finally feeling enough better to consider swimming. Fun to watch the surfers and the crashing waves though. There's a kayaker out there in this photo...

So far today we've read together, taken a little jaunt to the Blowhole, read some more....ok kinda boring I know. The photos I took on our jaunt are all on the camera...not much to see as the blowhole was quiet despite the high(er) surf. We did meet a couple who asked us "is this the road to Hana?". They were about as far off route as they could have been. Not a great area to be wandering around lost as there's no cell coverage and Haoles are not welcome.

My reading list this week has included several free novels which were all pretty sappy, several things I'm reading for a Spiritual transformation program I'm in; Henri Nouwen "In the Name of Jesus", a newer Dallas Willard book on Spiritual disciplines (my kindle is too far away to reach without getting up), Ruth Haley Barton's "Sacred Rhythms" and Mulholland's "Invitation to a Journey". I'm really enjoying Shane Claiborne's new(er) book on liturgy and common prayer and I keep reading parts outloud...poor Bob!
Bob and I are reading together Adele Calhoun's "Invitations from God" - the chapter on prayer this week. I picked up a great novel at the condo office lending library; The Postmistress, set during the start of World War II. Bob read Like Water for Elephants (my turn now) and is starting a Tom Clancy re-read today. I've read and re-read all the free pamphlets and the Maui Today newspaper...just in case I've missed something important.

So far the best part is the quarter page ad for a furniture store promising the plant's best assortment of "Electric" treasures. We are sorta skeered to find out what those are.

Friday - Upcountry to the winery

On Friday we woke to some rain, in fact Molokai was completely obscured from view, and ate breakfast on the lanai while watching a double rainbow develop.

 See...Molokai used to be right behind that rainbow!

View towards Kaanapali

Then we packed up our water bottles and headed back to the "valley" and upcountry to visit the local winery. The winery is on a very old cattle ranch - in fact I'm pretty sure it's the ranch my mom's cousin's family worked back in the 1940's. It's a huge spread and very quiet and beautiful. We caught the free tour and learned a great deal about the area and how they process their wines. An interesting fact we learned was that the original land-owner planted 150,000 trees on the property -many were very unusual varities. Those photos are on my camera so I can't share them now as I left the transfer thingy at home.

The tasting room is in what was built as a guest house for the Hawaiian king and his family. The first few years as they awaited the grape harvest they experimented with making pineapple wine, and it's actually quite good  - a fun change! We enjoyed the peace and quiet of the area a great deal.So did the cat...

One thing that surprised me was to find the Jacaranda trees still a bit in bloom - I thought we were too late in the season for that. The air smelled so sweet!

When we got back to Kula we stopped at the Kula Lodge to see the Curtis Wilson Cost art gallery and I snapped this photo of a trumpet tree in the parking lot.

We had lunch in Kahalui - at Da Kitchen. The photo shows Bob's Kalua Pork plate and my Teriyaki Chicken plate... we had enough food for our dinner that night as well. It was super good. Of course we had to stop for a doughnut - even though the light wasn't on. It wasn't worth the calories....not at all. But the car just headed there so what do you do?

Finally, another lovely sunset and a glass of wine to cap a splendid day in paradise. Aloha!

Thursday

Another day at the beach..... OK it hurts worse than it looks!

BBQ chicken with a marinade from the pantry...salt and pepper, italian seasoning, some Montreal steak seasoning, low fat Italian salad dressing, and the leftover chilie oil/shoyu from a lunch. Very tasty. Add some fresh kula swiss chard and you've got a great meal.

I can remember Wednesday...

Ah yes Wednesday. We had eggs for breakfast...I remember that....and went into Lahaina for groceries for dinner. We went to three stores (Farmer's Market for chard, lilikoi, a lemon), the Market there for toppings for a salad, FoodLand for more poke and sparkling water, and Safeway for pistachios and salami. Never did find anything to buy for dinner though! We futzed around the condo and read more...I'm actually quite tired of reading. I did some "study" reading and note taking with my new super cool Smart Pen....gotta love doing your homework at the beach. I was so engrossed that I got a sunburn.

For dinner we decided to go to Aloha Mixed Plate (AMP) and it was a good choice. The prices are super reasonable and we had chicken, teri beef and (Bob) Kalbi ribs/(Karen) fresh fish. Of course it comes with rice - white for Bob, brown for Karen  and really yummy mac salad. We had watered-down $3 mai tais too. I can't believe I was hungry enough to eat it all!

We returned to the condo and decided to dare to watch the sunset from the deck again - hoping the odd and talkative guy who trapped us the night before would not re appear. We had our second chat with a couple of folks who live here at Polynesian Shores so that was fun. As the sun retreated we did too - and watched a movie before sleeping to the sound of the waves for another night.

Tuesday

Neither of us can remember what we did or what we ate on Tuesday. I think we went out to breakfast at the Honolua General Store and had french toast - we did that one day...but oh well. Tuesday was mostly a rest day for Bob and we read and hung out at the condo. I have no idea what we did for dinner either! HA! We really are on vacation.

Down near the smoking area there's a tree with dead lei's on it. I wonder what the significance of this is?

(There's a turtle family in there someplace...do you see the one turtle poking her head out to say hello?)

HEY I remembered Tuesday! We went to the Whaler's Village shopping center and ate an early dinner at Hula Grill - one of my favorites! I had the Gado Gado salad, which I love. Unfortunately they forgot the peanut sauce dressing so I had to ask for it - quite annoying because without the dressing it's steamed veggies, rice and fish. Bob had the fresh catch of the day done taco style. We people watched and listened to the Aloha hour musicians, then window shopped a bit. Our dinner came with the trademark ice cream sandwich made of brownies, mac nut ice cream and raspberry sauce so we needed to walk that off!

All of Maui is very quiet this week - very few tourists and the mall and restuarants are slow. Nice to have the island to ourselves! For most of our stay there have only been 3-4 other renters at the condos. Last night 3 more families came in but it's still super quiet here.

Monday - Upcountry

Monday: Bob's shoulder is giving him increasing problems so we headed to Kahalui to the Kaiser clinic there for a medical appt. After x-rays and a trip to the pharmacy we drove upcountry to Makawao in hopes that an easy day would help his shoulder heal. We enjoyed the galleries and stores - though many were closed for Labor Day, and ended up purchasing an orginal watercolor at a little gallery. It's a whimsical piece and makes me smile - it features two little dogs named Chico and Chica, which seemed appropriate! We had a long talk with the artist's husband and ended up eating our take out lunch, purchased at the store across the street, while sitting on a bench in front of the gallery.

After we left Makawao, headed for Kula, we discovered we were ...sort of...lost...and aborted the attempt to go to Kula. We went instead to the little town of Paia and wandered around a bit and then headed to Wal-Mart for some supplies and back home. Bob took a long needed nap and Karen went to the local rib joint to get take out for our dinner. The ribs were unimpressive.

I'll post a couple photos of Makawao!

 Kirsten Bunney Studio and Gallery....

Makawao store - super friendly people and great food. We had a plate lunch of great kalua pork and rice and a salad of kale,chard and an asian dressing.

Sunday

Sunday: We enjoyed a typical lazy morning and then headed to Kapalua beach fairly early. We were treated to lots of open parking spaces and few people on the beach. This was our first snorkel of this trip. The water was quite calm and fairly clear. We saw the usual fish and I guess the highlights were a large parrot fish (we seem to see less of them than in our first years coming to Maui, I saw a wondeful eel who kept his head out for along time, looking around and not at all shy. As we came in I noticed a very large puffer fish under a rocky ledge and we watched him for a bit - he was very shy but would venture out far enough for us to see him. We headed back to our condo as the beach and parking lot were filling up.Scored an abandoned grass mat on the way out - this is the first time we haven't purchased them! When we got back to the condo we discovered a storage bin full of mats and such and picked up another one. Tonight was our night to go to  Sansei for sushi whuich involves standing in line for an hour before they open in order to get the discount...lo and behold they now check ID so we only got 25% off instead of the hoped for 50% discount. We had some great sushi rolls and sat by a property management guru who told us all about his life. We watched the sunset from our lanai. Oh wait, we do that every night...

Maui

View towards Kaanapali and Lahaina from our lanai.

Maui Trip Report

Here's an outline of our trip so far!
Friday was a travel day - Bob from American Samoa and Karen from Portland. Thankfully no major travel glitches occured. Bob got about an hour of sleep...leaving American Samoa at about 11 PM Thursday night (that's 1 AM Pacific time) and getting to Maui Friday morning. He ended up with sort of a long wait for Karen as the flight from SFO left the gate about 50 min late. He sat on a concrete wall for a couple of hours waiting....

We headed to Costco, along with everyone else on the island. Note to self: don't go to Costco on the first of the month/Labor Day weekend...yikes. Long, slow lines and we hardly bought anything! Then we headed to A Saigon Cafe for lunch. We were very surprised to see that they have a sign up on the roof now! Sorta ruined it for me! We had "Vietnamese Burritos" which are always good, and lemongrass chicken. After lunch we headed to our condo on the West side - in Honokowai. The condo is the second one from the end/water...Bob estimates we are 70 feet from the water. Really lovely view. The decor is lacking, complete with wallpaper border of fish and stuff and really tacky vinyl flooring, but the unit is clean, well equipped, and the location makes up for the interior design - or lack thereof. A quick trip to the grocery store for Poke and essentials and a light dinner of pasta and veggies and we were ready for sleep! We slept 11 hours Friday night!

Saturday we woke and enjoyed a lovely breakfast of fresh papaya, granola and yogurt on our lanai. Saturday was a very lazy day spent enjoying the scenery, popping into Lahaina and window shopping a bit, and we made a simple black bean chicken stir fry for our dinner. Yikes! I forgot that we had lunch at a new-to-us place in Lahaina up behind the newer shopping district. It's called Star Noodles and is owned by the OLL and Aloha Mixed Plate company. All homemade noodles. Very nicely done - the interior was nice, the staff was very friendly and helpful and the food was good. We had pork buns which were extremely good - not that nasty clump of char sui you normally get in the middle but instead nice slices of pork and fresh cucumber slices. We used the leftover fried noodles in our stir fry for dinner!

The resident maintenance man comes by each evening as he lights the tiki torches to tell us what time to watch for the Space Station to go overhead...it's a whole minute or two of viewing time and we keep missing it! He's very friendly and has lived here 36 years.

Time to go hang the laundry (doncha love to read that Mom?) and then I'll return to post Sunday and Monday!

Plumeria Tree

Maui in the summer time means lots of flowers in bloom; hibiscus of every color and size, plumeria everywhere, "flame trees" and more. This Plumeria is across the grounds from our condo. We also have lots of birds here and I was surprised this morning to see both male and female cardinals - surprised because I thought they only wintered here. The maintenance guy pointed out a Golden Plover which apparently is rare. Our first snorkeling adventure at Kapalua this morning yielded the usual goat fish, needle fish, and trigger fish, a couple of yellow tangs in an area we didn't really expect them in, an eel who was not terribly shy and let me watch him for a long time....and a really HUGE puffer fish under a rock overhang who was very shy!