Thanks for the feedback, everyone! Hopefully this trip report helps someone that is going to Hawaii in the near future. I received so much great advice from this board, that I wanted to make some sort of contribution back.

Now, on to the show...

HTR...3 Islands

Day 9, Friday, 12/5

We get up around 7:30 and have breakfast on the lanai again. I just love our little ocean front lanai!

Today's plans are to do the 9:15 am whale watch and to drive around the west part of Maui. Since we're winding down our stay on Maui, I figured we'd spend our last full day on Maui (tomorrow) doing Haleakala in the morning and the lazing around the hotel pool/beach again.

We get dressed and head in to Lahaina for our whale watch trip. Since we had a few minutes to spare before the required check in, we wander around the enormous banyan tree. There are signs all over the tree that say "no hanging, swinging, climbing, etc". What torture for a child! That tree is a child's dream for climbing and exploring.

We studiously avoid climbing, swinging, and hanging on the tree and pacify ourselves with a few photos instead. Then it's off to slip #6 to check in for our whale watch trip. It's a full boat for this excursion, and our names are not on the check in list. Rut roh.

The girl looks in the computer and sees that we were scheduled for monday, 12/8. Umm...no? We'll be in Kauai that day, but thanks anyway.

Since it's a full boat, we can either wait and do the 1:00 excursion, or come back tomorrow morning.

Irked beyond belief, we opt to do it tomorrow morning instead of waiting until 1:00, thereby wasting 2 hours in Lahaina. Hubby is so annoyed, he wants to scrap the whale watch excursion all together. I say no way, because Maui is the best place to see whales of all the islands, and I'm not leaving Maui without doing a whale watch trip.

Knowing when I'm ready to go into my version of a 5 year old hissy fit, hubby says fine, let's reschedule for tomorrow morning.

Our plan for the next two days has been radically altered. It looks like today, we'll go do Haleakala and the Old Lahaina Luau for dinner, and tomorrow will be the whale watch trip with the drive around west Maui (which we were supposed to do on Monday).

So we drive back to the hotel to change out of our suits. We grab the cooler and our jackets and we head off for our excursion to the top of Haleakala. If memory serves me correctly, we left the hotel around 11:00 am.

The way up to Haleakala is amazing. The different climates that you go through is breathtaking (literally, due to the elevation!). At one point, we drove through a part that looks like it could have been Colorado, and smelled rosemary of all things (does anyone know if there is a rosemary farm up there?). The air was cool, crisp, and smelled wonderful.

About 6,000 feet, the clouds started to become noticable (how could they not, since they were on the ground). The higher we got, the thicker the clouds. We finally get to the summit after many stops along the way.

Guess what? We're socked in. We're all the way up there and can't see more than 15 feet in to the crater. Major, major bummer. It' still pretty cool to see the clouds roll across the martian landscape not more than 15 feet in front of you. Very weird. Very quiet. So at least we could console ourselves with the fact that it was still cool to see, what we could see.

By the time we were ready to get back in to the car, I was really annoyed with the Pacific Whale Foundation's screw up. I had wanted to do Haleakala early in the morning (but not sunrise early), and had we have done it early, we wouldn't have been socked in, and would have actually seen the crater. So now if someone asks me how Haleakala was, I can honestly say that the ground looks cool!

We get back to room around 3:30-ish. Just enough time to take a break, and clean up for our Luau tonight.

The Old Lahaina Luau is located in Lahaina, ironically enough. We get there, and OLL staffers direct us to the Long's Drug's parking lot. Hey, look! It's our old friend, Long's Drugs!

We walk from the lot, check in, and wait in a 15 minute line to be seated. Furst the staffers give you your lei, a mai tai, and a photo opp.

We're taken to our traditional style seats in the front, and surprisingly, we have really good seats for such last minute rescheduling.

We meet our tablemates; a couple from DC, a couple from New Jersey, and another couple from CA. After ordering a few more drinks, it's our table's turn for the buffet. The buffet was ok. Not horrible as some people have ranted, but certainly not gourmet cuisine. It's what I would expect for this type of event. After the meal, they bring out a dessert tray that the entire table shares, and coffee for everyone.

Then it's on to the show. The show was really quite good. Good enough that I was glad that we did it once. Having now been to a luau while visiting Hawaii, I can now say we've done our token luau. and don't need to do another one any time soon.

One word of advice if you do go to the OLL, dress in hot weather clothes. There wasn't much of a breeze, even though you're right of the water. With all the people, plus the lights, plus the surrounding buildings, heat builds up pretty fast and it can get stifling at times. I was dressed in a pair of shorts and a cotton aloha shirt and I thought I was going to melt away. So dress appropriately.

The luau ended around 8:00, so we headed over to the Cannery Mall to get our car (since it's parked there near Long's, remember). Imake hubby wait for a bit because I need to run in to the mall to exchange a shirt that I bought from Crazy Shirts during yesterday's shopping excursion in Lahaina. While there is a Crazy Shirts in the Cannery Mall, it doesn't carry the same merchandise, so they ended up not having the shirt that I needed to exchange. I did have some luck at another souvenir store...and bought a few tshirts.

I run back out to the car, and make hubby drive back to the Crazy Shirts on Front St., where I hop out to exchange the shirt. Thankfully, my mission was a success!

I hopped back in the car and we were off to the hotel, where we would call it a night.

Hi there!

I'm baaaaccckkkk!!!!


Leave it to the holidays to de-rail a well intentioned trip report! Now that it's officially 2004, and in honor of the University of Michingan losing the Rose Bowl, I figured I'd start back to writing my never-ending report.

So without furthur ado, we will now return to HTR...3 Islands.

Day 10, Saturday, 12/6

Well, here we are on our last full day of Maui.

Sigh.

I'm so sad.

We get up around 7:30, and have breakfast on our lanai again. We gather up our stuff and head on in to Lahaina to do our whale watch excursion with the Pacific Whale Foundation.

We check in, and low and behold...our name is on the list!!. Life is good.

We wait around until the previous sailing comes back in, and then it's time to head out on the boat.

Let me tell you...this boat ain't pretty, but once you're on it, there isn't a bad seat. The scenery is still awesome, so for those that are worried about booking an sailing on Ocean Quest, don't sweat it. You'll still have an awesome time.

Well, even though whale watch season doesn't technically start until Dec. 15th, we were still able to see a whale. Yup. We saw A whale. One. Uno. Un.

By going before prime whale season, you are limited with the whale sightings. It's alot harder to find them, since there are fewer around. The early ones are the sub-adult whales that pretty much race to Hawaii like a 10 year old child racing away from his parents at an amusement park. Same priciple here.

Except WE were racing after him. I started to feel like Capt. Ahab in search of Moby Dick. There we were searching the waters off of Maui for this one single whale. It was kinda funny actually.

Well, thanks to the 7:00 am sailing, our captain pretty much had a good idea of where to look. Moby Dick (MD) was off the coast of South Maui. So off we went. It took a little over an hour to find him, and then we had to wait patiently for MD to run out of air down below. By the time that happened it really only gave us about 10-15 minutes of honest to goodness whale watching.

The one thing that was really cool, though, was MD's singing ability. That boy had a set of pipes! You could hear him singing without a microphone. Wow. Was that cool! You could feel the vibrations through the hull of the boat. He was that load.

The PWFs staff then put a mic in the water to let us clearly hear his song. This then lead to 80% of the boat doing their Dory imitation from Finding Nemo (you know the drill...Heelllllllllooooooooooooo meeeeeeessttterrrrrrr whaaaaaaaaallle...). Everybody's a comedian now. Just please be quiet so we can hear MD sing.

You could tell that even the PWF staff was excited by the singing. They did say that that was the first vocalization that they had heard for the year.

So after spotting MD, we head back to Lahaina. The 2 hour trip went incredibly fast, but it was a blast.

A word to those that want to go whale watching before February (when the majority of the whales are there). Don't book a 7:00 am whale watch, as you will be out searching the waters. The benefit to booking a later time is that the staff has a pretty good idea of where the whales will be from previous sailings, so you'll waste less time searching for them. Hopefully that makes sense.

So we get back to Lahaina, and we decide to get lunch at the Aloha Mixed Plate. I wanted to try it since we still hadn't tried a mixed plate yet. I had the Aloha mixed plate which came with the mahi mahi, chicken, and beef. It was pretty good. Hubby had the Chow Funn noodles, which I thought were very good.

After lunch, we headed back to the Westin for an afternoon of lounging around the pool.

Unfortunately, we had to skip the drive around the west part of Maui, since we really wanted to have one last day relaxing at the hotel.

The pool was again heavenly, and the ocean surf provided me with yet another round of exfoliation (man that surf is strong on Kaanapali!). We played around for several hours, and also made time to lounge around the pool to read, do postcards, and enjoy a refreshing foo foo drink.

And then, it was time to head back to our room to clean up and then to begin the dreaded packing process. We made same day dinner reservations at Sansei for 7:00, and wanted to be mostly packed up before we left for dinner so that we wouldn't have to deal with it when we came back.

We managed to catch some of the sunset, and then headed off to get our convertible from the parking lot.

It took us a good 20 minutes or so to get our car, because we couldn't find it! That parking lot is not that big that you could lose a car, but somehow we managed just that. It was fairly embarassing. We parked it in the last row, but toward the front of that row and we had completely over looked it despite the 4+ laps that we did of the parking lot.

Well, we finally found it, and still managed to get to Sansei on time.

We had another fabuluous dinner there, and finished it off with the heavenly apple tart.

Then it was back to the hotel to finish up packing and then to bed since we had to get up early for our 9:00 am transfer to Kauai.

Unfortunately, our Maui chapter was drawing to a close. We took comfort in the fact that the Kauai chapter still had to be written, starting tomorrow.

And that's how day 10 ended for us.