Day 13. Maui

We awoke at 4:15 AM and arrived at the visitor’s center near the summit of Haleakalā at 5:45 AM, an hour before sunrise. The guidebook (Maui Revealed) wasn’t kidding when it said to arrive an hour before sunrise to get a parking spot at the summit. We didn’t get a spot at the summit and there were only about six cars behind us that were able to get a spot at the visitors center. While I stayed warm in the car, Janel warmed up the camera by taking some pictures of lit-up communities on the coast. The area around the visitor center was quite crowded with people so we found the trailhead for the Sliding Sands Trail and walked about 2-minutes down that trail to find a fantastic vantage point with nobody around… helps to look at the map if you want to get away from people. The morning was chilly (the ground was white with frost) but at least it was calm. The sky was clear with clouds below us. The sun did rise (hasn’t failed us yet) and it was pretty spectacular to see it basically rise out of the clouds. Janel and I both agreed it was worth getting up early to see.

After revisiting the summit and taking some more photos we headed down the mountain. On the way back to the hotel we attended church at Saint Joseph Catholic Church in Makawao. It was a nice service with one of the hymns played with a harmonica.

After a lousy breakfast and packing at the hotel we headed over to the west coast. We did our final snorkeling at Po’olenalena Beach (aka. Paipu, Pepeiaolepo, Loves, or Keauhou Beach), where we had snorkeled on our third day on Maui. The snorkeling was pretty good on the north end of the beach but partly cloudy conditions made things kind of chilly. After lounging on the beach for a while we returned the snorkeling gear we had rented and did some gift shopping (almost everything is open here on Christmas).

After an early supper at Big Wave Café we took a walk on the boardwalk at Kealia Pond National Wildlife Refuge. Not too much to see besides salt-flats and a decent sunset.
Since our flight wasn’t until 11:20 PM we had a lot of time to spare so we went to the theater and watched “Little Fockers”. Pretty funny movie.

The flight home was uneventful, although we didn’t get as much sleep as we had hoped.

Overall, it was a very enjoyable trip. I’m not sure that we had a favorite island but we definitely didn’t see everything there was to see. I guess that gives us a good excuse to go back again someday.

Pictures from today can be found here.