To Maui

Apologies, everyone. I’m going full Grandpa Mode in this one. It needs to be done.

After passing through three airports ranging from nice to delightful (see I Love You Hilo B. Airport), renting a car, and driving around the western lobe of Maui, we negotiated the contactless check-in process to our condo (another post for another day), unpacked, and stepped outside just as the sun set. Apologies for posting yet another sunset photo! It fits and I love ’em!

By the time our first full day in Maui dawned, we had made the decision we wouldn’t be driving around much. That drive from Kahului Airport to our condo at Kapalua Bay had taken nearly an hour. With little of interest in the miles and miles of condos stretching south of us to Lahaina, which itself offered much less after the 2023 fire wiped out half of its center, we realized going to any of the attractions mid-island would mean a two-hour roundtrip drive…every day. Attractions on the eastern part of the island (Haleakala National Park, for example) would be even further. If this had been our first few days in Hawai’i….but they were not.

We did drive back that very first day, however, so I could connect with my cousin whom I had not seen in 40-50 years. I grew up with only three cousins, all girls, who lived many hundreds of miles distant by the time I entered school (especially when they moved to Hawai’i for a few years). I gained a fourth when she was born as I finished high school and college, but the cousin one year older than me passed away about 20 years ago. With only three surviving cousins, and only two I actually knew growing up, seeing my Maui cousin qualified as a Big Deal. We met at the Maui Brewing Company in Kihei. After a delightfully long meal full of laughter, reminiscences, and plenty of beer, we toured the gated community where my cousin’s husband works as head of security. It’s a sweet gig: he works but two or three days each week and rubs shoulders with The Rich. He dropped some names, but I’m not allowed to pass them on to you. Suffice to say, when one of them purchases a home there, they promptly drop about a million to remodel it.

At the end of the afternoon we faced that one-hour drive back. We stopped in Lahaina at a Safeway for supplies, representing the first time I’ve ever seen a wine cellar in a Safeway.

That night the sun dutifully set, and I just as dutifully captured it photographically with twenty shots.