Hawaii, Part One

Lauren here. Before Lloyd types up his stuff, I just want to complain that even though he is on vacation, I will be doing half the work for his posts. “I can’t upload pictures from my iPhone,” he says. Grumble grumble.

So I will open the photo texts he sent to my iPad, mail them to myself, download them from my e-mail to iPhoto, resize them, export them to the desktop, then upload them to the website. But I shall do so grudgingly. (But not too grudgingly, because I really like getting all those photo texts! Keep those coming!)

Ok, Lloyd. Fill this up with some text.

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Okay, so I didn’t know what pictures Lauren would post, and I don’t know what part of the adventure she wants me to write about, and I don’t know if she will want me to write about each day and since we, for some reason, only communicated in texts today I’ll just start with these pictures and then ramble on from there.

This is the airport in Maui. I was initially not very impressed with it, but when we walked through the doors that directed us to baggage claim, we were outside. The whole baggage claim area was in this ‘open on one side to the outside’ huge vaulted space. It was impressive, but Samith decided that he couldn’t wait there for the three hours that it would take for Brad to arrive.

Instead we rented a car and drove to the beach. We could have walked to the beach, but we wouldn’t have had any place to put our luggage. So it was more like we were renting a trunk. We went to the beach (this is not difficult on an island; just pick a direction and drive). But it was very  dark. Still, a nice start to any trip: a midnight walk on the beach. Then Samith got himself a tropical drink and we drove back to the car rental place 2 hours later, returned the car and retrieved our luggage from the trunk.

We got to Brad’s house and settled in for bed. We all woke up around 4:30am, because we were mistakenly under the assumption that it was 9:30 and a reasonable time to get up. Clearly this called for a sunrise walk on the beach…

But when we got outside Brad saw that they were burning cane in the distance. As he had always wanted to see a good old cane burning, but hadn’t the chance afore. So we got in the car and proceeded toward the burning cane. But then Brad noticed that the smoke was too high in the sky and the cane burning was well over. So we proceeded to the beach anyway, but too late for the sunrise.

After a pleasant walk on the beach where I started my sea glass collection, we loaded back in the car to go get some breakfast. Brad took us to a wonderful little place where I had an omelet with 3 things I’d never had before and Brad and Samith had banana pancakes. We also tried a fruit whose actual name I can’t seem to remember, but that I’ve been mistakenly calling papyrus all day.

Next stop: Walmart where we load up on all of the things that three guys who don’t really cook think they might eat over the course of the next few days. Peanut butter: creamy. Jelly: raspberry.  Total bill: $130. Oh, and there was a package of powdered doughnuts for $12.00.

After that went back to Brad’s house to unload out goods. It being 9:30 in the morning at this point we decided that naps were in order. Samith took his at Brad’s place. Brad and I waked to the beach. It is a grueling 5 minute walk, but well worth it. I built a little sand chair and put a towel over it and Brad setup his beach chair. We were about 20 feet from the water and under a beautiful shade tree. I read a bit and Brad worked on more insurance things. But we were only there for about an hour, because there were little gnats that found me attractive in a somewhat unwholesome way.

More napping ensued back at Brad’s place and at about 1:00 we fixed some ham sandwiches, ate them, and headed across the island so that Brad could deposit a check at the bank and visit his school to pick up a pay stub (more insurance business).

Then back across the island to Big Beach. It was great. Beautiful sand. Fun surf. Good Company. We were there for a couple of hours and then drove back. On the way back we stopped off for Shave Ice. It was to a snow cone as snow cones are to ice cubes. The Ice is like snow is supposed to be. The flavors were diverse and incredible (you could have up to three). There was ice cream on the bottom and cream on the top. We will have to go there again.

Next was a pizza place where we had some of the best pizza I’ve ever had. Is this starting to sound over the top? It really was a good day.

On the way home Brad and Samith dropped me off at the beach and I walked the last couple of miles while the sun went down and the stars came out. If you’ve been counting, that was 5 trips to the beach in the last 24 hours. I highly recommend Maui.

Now, at 9:30 we are watching Django Unchained.