Our Hawaii Vacation - 2

---

Oct 1-4

We arrived in Maui pretty early, arount 9:30 am since the flight was only 1/2 hour from Oahu. About a 1/2 drive to get to our hotel in Wailea on the South side of the island. We were staying at the Fairmont at Wailea, a Moroccan looking hotel with an Arabian Nights motif. The rooms were all suites so they were quite spacious. The hotel was awesome and had we not had a ton of activities planned it would have been great to just chill at the pools and beach. But no relaxing here, we needed to be up at 2 am to get up to the top of Haleakala Volcano watch the sunrise a 10,000 feet.

Needless to say we did get up at 2am but our van was an hour late picking us up, we could have slept until 3. Argh. The plan was to drive up the volcano, watch the sunrise and then bike back down to the bottom. The sun was rising at about 6am so we had to wait a bit freezing our butts off. Lucky I had read about the freezing temps and brought my winter shell. It was still cold with all the layers but was worth it to see the beautiful colors rise above the mountain. After about an hour or so it was time to pick up our bikes and don our gear for the ride down. The scenery changed so much on the way down and we were able to shed our layers when we reached a small town for lunch at a market. We ended our tour at Paia and Baldwin Beach. This was a great experience. After our bike ride it was still early enough so we ended up going to Lahaina a cute seaside town which reminded me of Sausalito.

Next morning it was up early again so that we could drive the road to Hana. Well lets just say this is not the best drive especially if you are the one doing the drive. It is very windey and narrow so at some spots only on car can pass. There isn't much sightseeing if you are the driver. We had decided to do the drive all the way around instead of having to complete the same experience again. Bad idea. Most of the roads are not paved and you literaly have to drive like 2 miles per hour. It took us forever to get on a normal road. Even though it is a beautiful drive you spend most of your time worrying about the car getting wrecked.

---