The Road to Hana

So here’s my final Maui post. It seems like Maui was two years ago, instead of two weeks. Life comes at you fast with little kids!

The Road to Hana is a day trip highly recommended in Maui (called one of the most scenic roads in the world). It is a curvy coastal road, 69 miles long, that takes 3 to 4 hours to drive (one-way), depending on how many waterfalls you stop to look at (and how many tourists you have to fight through). The road also leads to the black sand and red sand beaches that are blogged about here.

We’re always up for an adventure, and I ADORE waterfalls so the road to Hana was perfect for us! The waterfalls vary depending on rainfall; it was raining the day we drove through, so all of the waterfalls were FULL.

The entire drive is covered by tropical foliage like this:

The pathway on our first hike

Na’ili’ili-haele Falls

  Lower Puohokamoa Falls

Yep, that’s the road we’ve been driving!

I love this picture because it shows how many waterfalls are scattered throughout the area—I can only imagine how many we DIDN’T see!

Lower Waikani Falls (I think my favorite waterfall picture!)

Many of the falls would be under the bridges that you would drive over! We stopped at the black sand beach with another thousand tourists. Oh, well, it was awesome all the same.

Taken from the cliff side hike to the red sand beach. Isn’t the water color amazing!? Look at the upper left hand top of the cliffs. Yep, that’s a guy diving! The coastline was so beautiful! (‘Alau Island in the background)

We stopped at a roadside stand outside of Hana to sample some fresh Hawaiian fruit. Passion fruit was my favorite! I wish I would have taken pictures :( After all those falls (I haven’t even shown you half the pictures of the falls we saw, and we didn’t stop at all the falls) there were still more waterfalls to see.  Wailua Falls ‘Ohe’o Gulch. Sometimes you can swim in these pools, but the water was POURING down of them because of the rainsMore of the ‘Oheo’O Gulch (aka Seven Sacred Pools)

Now marks the spot where most people turn around and drive back the way they came. But what would an adventure be without a sketchy gravel road to drive on? So we continued on…and stopped to hike what ended up being our favorite waterfall. We were the ONLY people at this falls, and had to cross the stream to get to it. It was a wonderful experience! It’s hidden in the back left…this is just a taste of the hike Alelele Falls A forest on the way back…awesome! The “backside” of the road to Hana; much different than the lush drive we started the day with! And a perfect way to end an adventurous Hawaiian day: a rainbow!

Wordless Wednesday

Might be one of my favorite pictures ever!

Sam happy face. Seth sad face. We’ve been working on these…can you tell?

Sunsets of Maui

Ben LOVES a good sunset (my weak spot is an amazing waterfall—we’ll cover that in the final Maui post). And we experienced some amazing ones in Maui:

Night One from Kihei:

Night Two from the Grand Wailea:

Night Three from the top of Haleakala:

Night Four from Makena:

Night Five from the Five Palms Restaurant in Wailea:

I know, tons of pictures, right? Well, you should see how many I had to eliminate!

Crooked River 2012

I decided to take a brief Hawaii picture break to report on our trip last weekend: camping at Crooked River with the extended Morris family. Pictures of Seth and Sam are better anyways, right?

Highlights of Crooked River:

• Celebrating Great Grandma Morris’ 88th birthday.
• Hanging out with all the cousins: there were 10 kids under 5
• Holding new babies! Kasie’s baby is six months, and Alicia’s one month (yes, they’re crazy—or amazing—for camping with babies)
• Swimming in the pool. The boys loved it!
• Having my mom-in-law provide all the food for us so we didn’t have to deal with a cooler…that combined with pitching our tent on grass and bathrooms with showers almost makes camping bearable.
• Amazing lightning and thunder showers (with a rainbow at the end).

Low moments of Crooked River:

• Refer to final line of highlights; yes, those awe-inspiring thunder showers lead to DOWNPOURS on our poorly set-up tent…which lead to large puddles in our tent…which lead to damp sheets and a drip on my head in the middle of the night.
• Getting stuck in Portland traffic on the way home because we didn’t get the memo that I-5 south was closed for construction all weekend. Massive traffic jam = an extra hour of sitting in the car = me bribing the boys with licorice if they’ll just stop talking for 5 minutes (no they didn’t fall asleep for even 1 minute of the 4+ hour trip; the kids were fine with the extra hour in the car, Ben and I were going CRAZY!).

Sam, Seth, Judah. Judah was SO excited for the “Sammy’s” to get to camp

Happy Birthday Grandma Great!

Like father, like son

So excited to be with their uncles!

The boys were so excited to sleep in the tent for the night they couldn’t even stand still for a picture!

  Bedtime reading by lantern light

The boys love their camping chairs (and their Grandpa!)

Hanging out in the camper with cousin Harlee. The boys thought everyone’s trailers were the best. As we prayed with them on the second night, Ben was thanking God for our good camping trip, etc. Seth added in, “And thank you for letting me see the trailers.” So funny!

Ben and I finally take a star picture and our kids can’t even look at the camera…seriously? Seth

Sam

I promise I didn’t insist that Seth and Sam wear both water wings and floaty rings…we couldn’t talk them into wearing just one form of “help.” So they walked around the pool like over-protected dorks and we laughed at them a lot :)

  Snuggle time! Yep, they were just that tired that they fell asleep at 5:00 in the evening cuddling with me. Camping sure does tired everyone out. When we came home on Sunday, the boys were asleep by 7:45 and sleep in until 10:05 the next morning!