Trip to Maui

Hey everybody, we are back from our trip to Maui and we had a great time. We went to Iao Valley, took the drive to Hana, watched the sunrise at Haleakala, went snorkeling and much more. I am gonna have to do a few posts to catch up on all we did in 4 days. I will post a few pics here and then more on each individual place we went on the Hawaii blog. This first pic is of us in Lahaina at the massive 5 acre banyan tree! That's right 5 acres. This tree takes up the whole park. I was teaching Ady how to climb the tree. She tried it out on a few smaller parts.


While we were in Lahaina we stopped on along the edge of the wharf and watched the sunset. Ady liked sticking her head through the slats and watching the water more than the sunset. Then we were walking along and all of the sudden Ady stopped bent over and tried to do a somersault! It was so funny, right there in the middle of the sidewalk.


We got up at 3:30 in the morning our last day to drive to the top of Haleakala crater to watch the sunrise. It was so pretty. We went from sea level to 10,023 feet and were above the clouds. Haleakala is an old volcano on the east side of Maui. Very cool. The problem is that it was so cold. The temperature was just a little above 40 degrees and the wind was blowing.

We took some small hikes and on the hikes saw an abundance of plants and flowers that were absolutely beautiful. This is just on of the many many flowers we saw. This is a red ginger.


These are just two of the couple dozen waterfalls we saw. The one with Kasey in it is over 400 feet high. Kasey wasn't even wearing her swimsuit but waded right out into the water. She said "this is the biggest waterfall I've ever seen and I'm getting in." It started raining right about then and we all got soaked anyway.



We took a chartered snorkeling trip and although we felt it wasn't as good as Key West snorkeling we had a good time. We saw half a dozen turtles, colorful fish, a small reef shark and beautiful coral.


This is us at Iao Valley State Park. The tall mountain by itself is called the Needle and erosion has separated it from the rest of the mountain. It was really pretty and peaceful.




Here are the final pictures of our trip. These were all taken on our drive to Hana and the Ohe'o Gulch. The one of the arch is when we stopped at Wainapanapa State Park. All in all we had a great time and saw some amazing sights. If you made it through this far in today's post wonderful and if you want to see more give me a day or two and I will be posting a blog about each individual activity with more photos and more info. Later.