Well… I meant to blog throughout our vacation, but my real only source of easy blogging sort of failed on me. My iPad decided to stop working and I was unable to use it past the day I last blogged. And now that I’ve been home for a week, I have felt lethargic when it comes to filling in the rest of our trip. I will breeze over it.

One of the major excursions we did was take surfing lessons. My dad and I signed up for semi private instructing. This allowed us to both share one teacher — which was a very good thing because the other groups had about six people sharing an instructor, meaning your time out to catch a wave or two was limited by waiting in line basically. My dad went out a couple times but because too exhausted from the amount of work involved in the sport. He bowed out and it ended up being just a one-on-one surfing course. Exciting!

Fortunately, the actual surfing was not tiring for me — but the real issues I was having had to do with keeping myself up on the board. It became more of a mental challenge. You’ve got to know you have control of your balance on the board. It feels like you’re going to tip one direction — and thus you want to jump off the board to hypothetically avoid falling. But, if you just put a little strength in your legs and really fight that urge to tip over, it’s pretty easy to stay on the board granted you have the footing right. It was unfortunate, though, that I finally figured this mental factor out as I went for my last two waves. During this last run in I did my best, getting up on the board quickly, and on the second wave in I rode it all the way to the beach.

But I encountered some injuries I didn’t even really think about. I nearly blew out my knee on the second wave of the entire instruction course as I fell off the board into the water and slammed my knee into a rock. I had a small cut, but I didn’t find out until well after we were back on land and having lunch that my knee was well bruised and swelling up. Fortunately, it healed quite rapidly and I actually was back to running the next day. I also got a bruise on my heel, an abrasion on the side of my foot, sore ribs from hitting the surfboard, and weird neuralgia on my hands from the slip-resistant coating on the board. However, the pros of surfing well outweighed the injuries, and I’d be very happy to try it again.

Sunday, July 25, was my mom’s birthday. We had a great day driving around upcountry Maui throughout the day, and that evening we enjoyed The Feast at Lele, the same luau we attended seven years ago.

The following morning my dad and I went on a Blue Hawaii helicopter tour of Maui. It was a nice view from the sky, but some was left to be desired as it was not fully a “full island tour” like stated. Likewise, I enjoyed it greatly.

The last Thursday we took a ferry from Lahaina to Lanai. This was an approximately 30-minute trip across the water. We were a bit skeptical of what Lanai might have to offer us. We asked various people what there is to do there and most of them said “nothing”. We decided to go anyway because we realized that we would be disappointed if we had not checked it out ourselves. So, we went to Lanai a took a short bus ride to Lanai City. I’ll tell you there is nothing to do there. It was still quite early in the morning so we were hungry for some sort of breakfast. We chose a sort of shack-like place called Canoes. I’ll tell you again that I have no clue what the motivation of that area is. Their building and other buildings around are about to fall down. We sat in fold-out chairs at plastic tables. There were holes in the walls and operations seemed suspicious and not up to par with health department regulations. Creamer for coffee was evaporated milk. My mom’s crepes seemed to have been pre-frozen. My dad’s hamburger in his “Loco Moco” was strangely soft or mushy but seemingly cooked. My mom had minor “after-effects” later that day. To top it off, this rundown building was ironically garnished with an approximate 60-inch flat-screen television with high definition programming. It seems this is quite the incentive to bring locals into the shop for a bite to eat. You are advised.

So… We were worried that we just made this costly ferry trip to Lanai and now there’s absolutely nothing here to do. We ended up catching the bus back down the hill to the first Four Seasons Hotel next to the beach (there are two of them on the island and they are the only two you can stay at besides a much more “quaint” Hotel Lanai). This Four Seasons Hotel was beautiful!  Their pool area was so picturesque. As per Hawaii regulations, the public must be granted access to all beaches. We found the path down to the sandy oceanside — and boy was I very happy to see such a nice sight. It was a large, fine-sand beach. My mom wasn’t too content with how big the crashing waves were. Despite the entire coastline into the water being 100-percent sandy and soft, it was a quick drop off, causing huge tubular waves to slam onto the shore. I thought it was incredibly fun. I had my goggles and found great entertainment in diving blow the surface as the wave would break. The fun lasted hours. However, after tiring my body out, I fell asleep face down on the beach — subsequently earning myself a bright red, sort of strawberries-and-creme sunburn line on my legs where my boardshorts ended. It was like pasty white upper thigh color (or lack of) came to a halt to the glowing pinkish burn. And it hurt that evening. Fortunately there’s something called Aloe Vera that, applied numerous times, soothed the burn and damage quickly.

There’s so much that we did, so many places we ate at, so many stores and locations we visited. I can’t write it all. I can only suggest you take an adventure of your own to Maui sometime and discover the fun and relaxation for yourself. Cheers!