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!