Holy Maui

Wowsers, what to say! Hawaii feels like a total blur and some weird combination of cruising and vacation. Somedays feel like pure vacation, like when we rented a car on Oa’hu, other days feel like super hard cruising. Adapting to cruising here with our newborn, Bowen, has been an interesting ride. There were certainly some tears and messy moments on my part during the first week. I was simply tired. Tired from the crazy week before of having a baby and organizing to get back to Asunto, tired of the newborn night feeds, tired from life. But luckily things started to settle. I grabbed some naps here and there and before I knew it we were back in the groove. Kolby has been a champ – helping Fynn out and managing the boat and boosting me up when I had my break downs. Luckily Bowen will sleep well in his bed so I don’t have to spend all my time juggling the needs of two! However I do feel that it is really hard to blog. I am always too tired at the end of the day write something and then everything turns into a blur in my head.

Who doesn’t love baby cuddles!

And then there were two! Bowen is just two weeks old here.

So we left Honolulu for Maui, which has the most anchorages of all the islands. We decided not to go to Kona as we just didn’t have the time to do that much travelling, and Maui is a pretty awesome island. We headed to the roadstead of Lahaina first, where we tucked in for the night after a full ten hour day from Honolulu. Craving some good snorkelling and swimming we bumped down the coast the next morning to Coral Gardens, but the visibility was poor. Our friends from Yare were headed to Lahaina so we left Coral Gardens after only one night and met up with them on route.

So happy to see these guys!

Cruising kids are fast friends, age is much less important!

Once we turned the corner to the roadstead the wind was up to about 25 knots and the waves were getting choppy. YUCK! Yare was in full foulies- it was certainly a wet ride. We tried to anchor but didn’t like out position so we grabbed a mooring ball compliments of the Lahaina Yacht Club. This ended up being and excellent decision as the mooring was free and the winds held stead at 20 plus knots for the next three days. More than ready to get off the boat that was bucking like a bronco we decide to rent car with Yare and tour the island. So the next day we packed up all four kids, beach gear and cars seats onto the bus and head to Ke’hei to pick up the 8 seater mini van.

This is all our stuff…

1.5 hours on a bus – un fun!

We had some pretty strange looks on the bus! After a beach day in a wind and rain storm, we decided we should attempt the road to Hana in the morning. It was an early morning start and a full day but the kids were great. We all voted we prefer travelling by boat all day over travelling by car. What a long time to be strapped in one spot! The only disappointment on the road trip was the 7 Sacred Pools were closed due to flooding.  We had a second day in the car where we attempted Mt Haleakaema but it was completely fogged in and not a glimpse of a view to be had for our efforts. The last half day with the day we the car we got down to business – laundry, propane, food. Basically the essentials.

On the Road to Hanna