Hello from Maui! We’re about halfway into our Hawaii trip and we’re both sunburnt and about 70% Maui Gold Pineapple right now. Seriously – I haven’t been able to stop eating all the amazing pineapple here on the Island!! We’ve spent the past fews nights in Kihei using this little beach town as our home base for exploring Southern Maui. Next, we’re off to the Hyatt up the coast!
Our hotel is right on the beach, so it’s been easy to pop over there for naps or to catch the sunset each night, which I’ve been loving. They are so stunning here! But mostly we’ve been running around the island doing all of our “adventure” activities the past few days – like the Road to Hana and catching the sunrise over Haleakala Crater. As travel bloggers, we love seeking out the best for you guys, but we also wanted to make this a bit of a REAL vacation, too! So, we split the first half into lots of “doing” which has been a total blast.
On our first full day, we did the Road to Hana. I’ll be writing a whole blog post guide on that soon, don’t worry! Robin got a bit nervous driving the windy roads and I was bummed out that it was raining too hard that day to swim in any of the waterfall pools (they were all massively flooding and it wasn’t safe!) but we still absolutely loved exploring this famous road. We downloaded the Gypsy Maui app and got to learn tons of history about the road and the Island.
The next day, we booked a last minute snorkel cruise on the Four Winds. We’re right on the tail of whale watching season so we hope we could combine a whale watching cruise with a snorkel cruise. Didn’t even up seeing any whales as they were mostly all migrated at this point, but I think this cruise was my favorite thing we did so far! It’s so relaxing to sail out to a random coral reef, jump off the boat into warm water, swim with the fishes for a few hours and end it with pulled pork sandwiches and beer on the sail ride back. 100% would recommend any snorkel cruise – check out Trip Advisor to see which ones are currently having a sale for the best deal.
Yesterday, we woke up at 3am (yes, 3am on vacation!!) so we could drive to the top of Haleakalā National Park, the volcano here on Maui, to watch the sunrise. I’m a morning person, and we’re still actually on West Coast time right now, so I found it pretty easy to wake up and drive us up. Robin, on the other hand, was FAST asleep the entire 2-hour drive to the top – hehe! You have to make reservations online ahead of time, but other than that, it’s really easy to drive up, park the car, find a comfy rock to sit on and watch the sun come up. It’s magical up there as the crater summit is taller than the clouds. You feel like you are walking on the sky! I’ll be also writing a whole post about this process with tons of other tips, will link it here when it’s up!
Lastly, we went to the Maui Plantation last evening for a tour and happy hour, then popped open a bottle of Maui Pineapple Wine on the beach for sunset. This morning, we’re off to the Hyatt for the second part of our Maui trip!
Can’t wait to keep on sharing all the Maui gems we find with you!
