Slow start to the day; had to see if we could find a charger for the camcorder since Dad stupidly left the one in the plug at home (did have success here, thank goodness). Proceeded to go back over to Kahului for lunch at Da Kitchen; boys had teriyaki chicken and rice, Kevin had penne pasta w/ chicken, Suzanne had teriyaki beef, and I had a combo (the “braddah” plate) with the chicken, a pulled pork, and spam! Gotta love spam!
Iao Valley State Park: After lunch, we went up to Iao Valley State Park for a small hike.
The attraction of the Park is the Iao Needle, the rock formation shown here.
The hike takes you along the Iao stream as well; we’re staying on the southwest side of the island…when we look back to the north at the mountains it’s nothing but prairie grass and a few scrub trees as far as we can see. On this side of the island (the north) it’s trees everywhere. Quite a striking difference.
Hikes are a big hit with the boys; Fric and Frac frequently testing the limits of how far in front or off the beaten path they can go. Boys will be boys….
Sometimes the boys can be pretty cute.
Like this one.
Real real serious!
Kevin has taken a lot of photos this trip; once he gets them organized we’ll have to feature a few of them.
Wailea: After the hike, we went back to the hotel to get the snorkeling gear and see if we could do some of that at a beach on the southern side of Maui (where the waves were supposed to be less). Learned a good lesson here; if people are surfing at your beach, you won’t be snorkeling, the waves will kick up too much sand for you to see anything.
Spend about 2 hours at the Ulua beach near Wailea. The waves were the roughest I think we’ve ever been in; I was body surfing and got completely hammered at one point. The wave flipped me over as I was coming in to shore and slammed me into the ground (actually heard a ‘crunch’ noise as my shoulder and face hit); the side of my face has a good scrape and I’m going to be plenty sore in my left shoulder and ribs tomorrow. I’m very lucky it wasn’t worse; if I had hit somewhere with a rock outcropping instead of sand…still ended up staggering out of the water holding my shoulder and hoping I hadn’t broken anything.
Anyway, we spent the rest of the time dealing with the waves and getting crushed by them. Suzanne had the water-camera out for a bit (before the battery died) and got a few photos of note:
Christopher and Matthew having fun in the waves; you can see the sand churning up turning the water brown and making snorkeling a waste of time.
When we were in full on wave-crashing mode later on in the day (after this picture) Matthew, after each wave would hit and fail to knock him over, would turn to the ocean and yell “I’m still up!” as loud as he could.
Not a lot of shells here…some coral though.
And this picture is awesome….Suzanne was really lucky to catch Kevin’s boogie boarding this well!
I took these two pictures of the sunset at the beach with the camcorder….Suzanne has a few like it on her camera as well.
