Last Day in Paradise

We had to check out of our condo today.  We enjoyed the view as much as we could before we had to depart.

The inside was nice too.  It had a relaxing and upscale feel to it, which is just what we wanted for our vacation.

More pictures of us.  I needed the flash to take away the silhouette effect, but it almost makes it look like we're in front of a fake background.  I can assure you it's real, and it's amazing.

Flights out of Maui's airport back to the mainland leave either in the morning or the evening.  This is because with the distance and the time change, morning flights will arrive in the mainland in the evening, and evening flights will arrive in the mainland the following morning.  Airports generally don't have inbound flights in the middle of the night, which is when they would be for mid-day departures from Maui.  So we had a lot of time to kill today after our condo checkout and before our 10:00 PM departure flight.  We decided to go to the beach in front of the Sheraton.  All beaches in Hawaii are public beaches, so you can go anywhere.  The Sheraton has an amazing beach, as you can see here, so we decided it would be a good way to spend our day.

We rented a cabana, which is what they call this contraption.  It was great.  It has two lounge chairs with a shade that you can move to wherever you need it to be.  With Meghan's propensity to get sunburned, we needed shade for the day, and this fit the bill.  We spent the day reading and taking a break to go eat lunch at one of the beach restaurants (Haute Dog).

I rented some snorkel gear a couple days ago, but the water was too rough near the condo, but the Sheraton has Black Rock, which is known for its great snorkeling.  So I put on my gear and headed out.  I saw amazing fish, of course (because we're in Hawaii, and that's how it goes here), but I also saw several of those huge green sea turtles.  They are endangered, so there are signs everywhere telling you not to harass them, and that you shouldn't even get close, because someone might report you.  So I tried to get close, but not too close.  I wish I would've had an underwater camera, but this picture captures what it was like.  It was pretty crazy.  And these guys just didn't care about anything else,  They would go wherever they wanted to go, and a couple times they came right at me.  Not wanting to get nailed with some sort of federal endangered animal harassment charge, I quickly re-positioned myself out of the way to let the turtle go wherever he was going.  Watching them swim right toward me was really amazing.  It pretty much looked exactly like this.  And these guys are not small.  They are four and five feet long.  And they have hard shells and sharp fins and beaks, and they are not going to go around you.  They expect you to move, so you do.  I explored all around Black Rock and saw four different turtles, including a mama and a baby feeding on the algae on the rocks.  It was one of the highlights of the trip for me.

Finally it was time to pack up, as the beach equipment had to be turned in, so we then headed to Lahaina for dinner and souvenir shopping.  Next up is our long red-eye flight home with a layover in LA.  Good-bye, Hawaii!  We'll miss you!

Sunsets and Sushi

Usually I do pictures in chronological order for a post, but I'll make an exception in this case, because this picture just needs to be at the top. I'll probably never take a more perfect picture of nature. This could be on a postcard or mounted on a wall or something. I'm not giving myself credit, because God did all the work.  I just grabbed my camera and captured an image of it.

The actual first picture of the day is this one. I don't normally eat breakfast at home, but on vacation I almost always do. I also don't normally have coffee on a daily basis at home, but since we're in Maui, I'm pretty sure the right plan is to get up and have breakfast and coffee on the lanai while enjoying the ocean.  So that's what I did every day in our condo.

This was the view from our second floor lanai during the day and the sandy beach just to the right out the back door of our condo.

Here you can see how the waves crashed up against the rocky shore just on the other side of the retaining wall, and then how the waves lapped against the sandy beach just a few yards further down.

When we first got to the condo, Meghan spied something black crawling on the wall and was a little grossed out and wary of it. I was pretty sure it was a crab, even though I'd never seen a black crab before.  But sure enough, if you go look on the rocks on the other side of the retaining wall, they are everywhere.  In fact, I thought I was taking a picture of one here, but later when I looked at the picture and zoomed in, there are four of them.  I think the normal orange crabs are cute little guys, but these are not.  Maybe it's the black shells, but they look sinister and like giant bugs who may also be poisonous alien lifeforms or something.  Fortunately there's nothing to worry about, as they are total scaredy cats.  If you get within about six feet of them, they will scurry away and hide under a rock.  So no death by creepy killer black crab, but also no tasty dinner either.

As the sun set, the aqua color of the water was replaced by a shiny dark blue that reflecting the sun beautifully.

I barely remembered to stop taking pictures of the ocean and to actually take a picture of us as we sat on the lanai enjoying the setting sun.

For dinner, we decided on sushi.  After the sun had set, I drove to a nearby sushi restaurant to get takeout.  It looked really good, despite how terrible it looks in this picture, and tasted great.  We enjoyed sushi and wine on our lanai in the Hawaiian night while listening to the ocean.  What an amazing trip it's been,

Lounging at Lokelani and Lahaina

The place I chose for us to stay for the second half of our trip is the Lokelani Condos in Honokowai just north of Lahaina.  Last time we went to Maui we stayed at the Papakea, which is very close to this place.  I wanted a place with a direct oceanfront view, and with a bedroom that opened directly to the ocean.  There were a few other things I wanted, and Meghan had a wish list as well.  Thanks to the beauty of VRBO, I was able to find several properties that met all of our criteria.  I was able to negotiate it down to a good rate, but you still never know if you'll be happy with a place until you see it in person.  But we arrived yesterday, and it was great.  It has a really nice interior.  It has two floors, so both the living room and the master bedroom have their own lanai, opening right up to the ocean.  We are about 30 feet from the water, as you can see from the picture on the left, which is looking out from our bedroom lanai.  There is a sandy beach about 100 feet to the right, but right in front of the condo is a grassy lawn and then a wall that has a rocky shore on the other side.  We walked out to the beach today and saw this giant green sea turtle just lounging on the beach.  It's hard to tell scale from the picture, but he's about four feet long.  It's pretty amazing to see something like that.

We wanted to lay out on the beach and read, but it was high tide, so there wasn't a whole lot of beach available, so we instead used the lounge chairs on the grassy area.  We spent a lot of time today reading and just enjoying the sounds of the ocean as the waves crashed against the shore.

The sun started to set, which resulted in some beautiful pictures of it reflecting off the water.

For dinner we went to Lahaina and ate at the Cool Cat Cafe.  They had really good burgers.

There is a banyan tree in downtown Lahaina that's 142 years old and 60 feet high. It looks like a forest, but it's just one tree. Meghan and I spent some time there last time we were in Maui, so we wanted to walk by it again.  To get an idea of how big it is, see how small Meghan is in the picture on the right.  We had a nice evening out.  We are looking forward to another relaxing day tomorrow.

Farewell to the Four Seasons

Today was our last day at the Four Seasons.  My company covered us for three nights there.  Because we already had our airfare covered no matter how long we stayed, and because we were already making the trip out here, we decided to extend our trip three extra days.  But today we had to check out of this hotel.  I took one last walk around the property and was able to fully appreciate the beautiful grounds and the perfect and pristine beach.

The view from our lanai was pretty good.  We could see the ocean, so you can't complain about that.  Our room was pretty fantastic.  I didn't get a great picture of it, but here's half of the bathroom (I couldn't fit the other half in a picture).  The accommodations were definitely five-star.

Our room keys had pictures of some of the unique pieces of art that decorated the grounds.  One of them was in the lobby, which was one of my favorites, so I asked Meghan to stand by it for a picture.

The Four Seasons is something like $900/night, so we decided to stay somewhere else for the second half of our trip.  We rented a car using my accrued free rental days from my travel.  I use National, which means I can pick out my car from the lot, and there was a nice Infinity QX70 available.  It's a luxury compact SUV, so our upscale vacation continues.  I rode to the airport on the shuttle, and then rented the car and drove it back to the Four Seasons to pick up Meghan and our bags.  She is finally feeling better (we were able to get a late checkout to give her more time to recover), and now we're off to the northern part of the island to our condo.

Sunny Beach, Rainy Reading, and a Luau

We had no particular agenda this morning, so Meghan and Donna went out to the beach in the morning.  They both wake up early, and it gave them a chance to lay out together and catch up on things.  I slept in until a normal hour, as time changes have no effect on me, and joined them.  The beach here is amazing, and it's no coincidence the Four Seasons built their property here.  We all had the choice to either go golfing or get a massage.  Steve had chosen golfing, so he was on the course.  Meghan, Donna, and I relaxed on the beach for awhile until it was time for Donna's massage, when she left.  It was about lunchtime at that point, so Meghan and I went over to the restaurant that overlooks the ocean and had a nice lunch and a dessert of delicious piña colada popsicle.

After that, we went to our massages.  Meghan chose the reflexology, which apparently involves mostly massaging your feet, and I went with the deep tissue massage.  After that we had free time until our luau.  Meghan took a nap, while I went down to the adults pool to read.  On a previous vacation I found a book in one of those give-a-book/take-a-book things that looked interesting.  It was called Pursuit of Honor, by Vince Flynn.  I really liked it.  It was a lot like my all-time favorite show, 24.  So for this vacation I decided I would read another book in that series (the Mitch Rapp series), so I went with the one that is chronologically first in the series, American Assassin.  I bought it on the Kindle (the soon-to-be-kids' Kindle), so it's been nice to read that on the plane and whenever else I've had time.  Not too long after I went down to the pool, it started to rain, so I took cover under a large umbrella and continued to read (you can see a couple people in the pool who also didn't let the rain affect their plans).  It was actually really pleasant to read while hearing the rain fall.  In the distance you can see some orange spheres.  Those were part of the decorations for our luau tonight that was supposed to be out on the beautiful lawn at sunset.  Unfortunately the rain didn't stop, and when I saw them take down the decorations, I knew it was a bad sign.  When I got back to the room, Meghan said we had gotten a notification that, as expected, the luau was being moved indoors.

The reason I was able to go on this trip in the first place is because I have a great sales rep.  As the Sales Engineer, I contribute to the sales process a fair amount, but without my sales rep doing his part to drive and close business, nothing else would matter.  I almost always work with multiple sales reps, but it's been a constant for the last 7 of my 8 total years as an SE that I've worked with Jim.  He's great.  He's an outstanding salesman in the way that he's such a nice guy and everyone likes him, but he always drives business and gets results.  Personally, I like him a lot, as we have similar interests and get along well.  He has qualified for Club three times, which are the three times I have gotten to go (The Atlantis on Paradise Island in the Bahamas in 2009, Red Rock in Vegas in 2011, and the Four Seasons in Maui this year).  So I'm very thankful to have him.  His wife Theresa is also really nice and is super funny and had our table in stitches with her stories.  Here Meghan and I pose with Jim and Theresa, and then also with Steve and Donna.

Here are Meghan, Theresa, and Donna, and then me with Stu, Benton, Pierre, and Jim.

Meghan felt sick at the end of the night, and may have gotten the flu.  But here she was earlier in the evening much happier and much less sick.

The luau itself was pretty good.  We had a fixed menu for the food.  It was good, but it wasn't as good as the luau food we had last time we were in Maui, which was outstanding.  The dancers did a great job, but they seemed like they were a little crowded on the small stage they had to work with.  I think it probably would have been quite a bit better in the original outdoor setting.

No luau is complete without the fire guys. This luau only had one, but he was pretty good.  It was a really good evening, except for Meghan not feeling well at the very end.  It's too bad we couldn't have done it outside, as I think that would have been really nice, but it was still a really fun thing to see and do.