Maui

Maui has been a lot of rest and relaxation. We spent most of our time at the beach, laying around, reading, watching for whales and body surfing! This year we learned that you could hear the whales under the water so we spent quite a bit of time holding our breath to hear them talking and it was truly amazing!!!! I also read a fiction book (the last hunger games book) for the first time in years (even Ryan who prides himself on how few books he had read in his lifetime).

We've been trying not to get too off our sleep schedule so we've been going to bed every night around 8:30 and we're up at 5:30-6. I have been exercising in the morning since there's so much time before we can do anything. Today we woke up at 6:30 which is 9:30 at home so we're in trouble :(.

The last couple days here called for wind and clouds so we sort of last minute decided to make the trip to Hana. We experienced torrential downpours, sun and lots of rainbows all in a 10 hour span.

It was definitely worth the journey but we were very tired. We saw colorful eucalyptus trees, many waterfalls, black sand beaches, caves (where we got eaten by mosquitoes. I counted 17 bites yesterday morning just from the knee down!), a bamboo forest, and some amazing scenery and views. The road was just as windy as you hear but neither of us got carsick probably because we were so focused on the amazing amount of rain hitting our windshield. We got caught outside in the rain twice and by the time we got to the car we were absolutely soaked. There was a lot of laughing going on :). Our last stop was The seven sacred pools at Kipahulu. There was a 4 mile hike to see a 200 foot waterfall and we were not really thinking we were going to do it because of the rain but then it cleared off in 3 minutes (because that's what it does here) and we decided to make the hike. It was awesome, but seemed like 8 miles! We were very happy to get back in the car and take the unpaved, windy, one lane road (with a several hundred foot drop to our immediate left). We downloaded an app that told us where to stop and little stories about interesting things along our drive which I would highly recommend.

We spent our last day at the pool getting wind blasted and sun burned :).

Back to reality tomorrow......