Life of Wry

The next eight posts will be all travel log–pictures & commentary to document Peter’s post graduation trip to Maui. Now… that said, I don’t really have many photos that show Peter’s and his compadres’ adventures, as the boys largely imposed and enjoyed a parent-free vacation–most of the time, we parents were banished, sent off to enjoy our own adventures. Those, I have pictures of. Where our adventures intersected, which happened once or twice, I have some good kid shots… and will post, of course.

I am assembling the Hawaii vacations posts now, a few days following our return, but am composing each day’s summary in the present tense for that day. (Like I need to explain this…)

Here goes…

We picked Darlene and Jacob up at their house this morning at 4:30am, then hung out in the Hawaiian Air part of Terminal B. The Peet’s side (v. the Starbuck’s side, where the Southwest gates are). That was nice for a change! It’s always fun to watch the sun rise as you’re preparing to take off on a fabulous vacation:

Here are our travel companions:

Darlene…

Jacob (and Peter)….

I got to sit with Peter for both legs of the journey. Happy mom.

Verdant Maui! We arrived on the island, after a short layover in Honolulu, at 11:35am.

We hooked up with Reed-who’d flown in on another flight–in the Kahalui airport…

We made quick work of the car rental (not really), and headed to Mama’s Fish House, on the Hana Highway, just outside Pa’ia, to meet the others for lunch.

Parked the car, entered the grounds, and got our first on-the-ground beach sighting of the trip; ridiculously, tropically pretty :

Satisfied beach boys:

We all (our entire 14-person group) ended up in different dining rooms. Here’s our table (and yeah, the first of many umbrella drinks):

Also the first of many fish dishes. This was a swordfish-like fish, can’t remember the name, but excellent. The menu gives credit to the fishing boat and fisherman/woman who caught the fish, which was cool. That fresh.

Very pricy, but very worthwhile.

After lunch we walked around a little more…

… then headed back into Kahalui to provision up at Costco.

Here’s a shot along the way of these wonderful trees (not sure what they are, but they’re all over). I just love their canopy:

Hawaiian Costcos have lots of tropical fruit…

We first dropped off the boys (and a few bags of food) at their condo (Westin Ka’anapali Ocean Resort, North). The Bairs have a time share here. Five boys in one part of the condo (Peter, Jacob, Reed, Daniel and Jordon), and two 20-something women (Daniel’s sister Kelsey and her friend Carolyn) in the adjoining unit. Yali and Aaron were in another part of the North complex, and Denise, her daughter Helena, and boyfriend John were in the South complex.

Here’s Peter on their 6th floor balcony overlooking the ocean and pools. It did not suck.

Darlene and I drove north a couple miles to our place, an Airbnb unit I found–the much smaller, quieter Kuleana. The grounds at Kuleana are very well tended–clean, tidy and beautiful. We also later learned that the management is very fussy about every little thing… which is good, and helps to ensure that everybody’s visit is as perfect as it can be.

Our unit, completely adequate and thoughtfully featured, is about 50 yards from the water’s edge, a short meander away:

Here’s unit 309: second floor, on the left…

And the view from our lanai (I took the next few photos the following day, but wanted to post here to illustrate fabulousness):

Our beach is wonderful… semi-secluded, sandy, with a great view of Molokai and Lanai.

This is me all happy and pleasantly surprised… because you just never really know what you’re going to get with these things:

And back to today… here is Darlene as we sat on our beach (or in Darlene’s case, stood in the water) and watched the sunset:

Day one: exceeded all expectations.