Aloha...

....from Maui

As you've probably figured, we arrived safely to Maui. We flew from Minneapolis to Seattle to Maui. It was a pretty bumpy ride from Seattle because of unexpected turbulence, but we got here in one piece. After we landed, we got our rental car, bought groceries, crashed, got up the next morning and toured the town of Lahaina and arranged some tours, and found a place that would give us two weeks of wireless. Then we spent the rest of the day on the beach.

Yesterday, we went to Iao Valley State Park and Maui Tropical Plantation. I loved the Plantation...it was so beautiful with papaya bushes, guava, banana, and other trees or bushes. I learned that pineapples grow on bushes, not trees (am I the only one who didn't know that?) and we learned how to crack a coconut. We had lunch there too.

Today, Gary and I got up at 3:00 am to drive two hours to the top of Haleakala to see the sunrise. It's 10,000 feet up and very cold....it was 36 degrees and quite windy. We got there while it was still dark...the stars were spectacular....we could see the disk of the Milky Way, the Big Dipper, and a whole bunch I never knew existed. The event we were waiting breathlessly for, the sunrise, started out good, but then some clouds rolled in and blocked the view. So,the next pictures will be a rather lame sunrise and a few pictures we took on the way home. If you enlarge the second sunrise picture, you can see Venus.

Tomorrow, it's off to Lanai.