In an earlier post, I mentioned that this Hawaii trip is being split between Oahu and Maui. So here's the story. My dad always had a dream of having a whole bunch of tropical fruit trees so he could just walk outside and pick his favorite fruits every day. Well, he and my mom ended up looking at a place on Maui that kinda fit that dream and decided to give it a go, at least for a while. They're not really farmers, so I'm not too sure if it'll last, but we'll just have to wait and see there. Anyway, Connie's parents left Saturday night and today the rest of us headed over to Maui to spend the next couple of weeks at the place there.
Flying between islands is really quick. While you still have to deal with airport check-in, security, and all that time consuming stuff, the actual flight from Oahu to Maui was only around half an hour. Though it was also the first flight were we had to buy Zack his own seat since he just turned two a few days ago. While the extra space is nice, having to buy an additional ticket for every flight from now on will be annoying.
My parents' new place is half an hour outside of the main town, up in the hills. It's a nice enough house with a large fenced in garden or back yard of sorts with a whole lot of fruit trees and some ducks and chickens, which Zack really enjoys. However, it started raining soon after we arrived so we only had time for a quick look around before heading indoors to unpack. I'll write more about the place, "farm life", and Maui in general in upcoming posts.

Random Hawaii Comment: General Notes on Maui
Maui is the second largest Hawaiian island (after the big island) and the second most populated (after Oahu). That said, it only has one large town (or maybe small city) and a collection of small towns, many of which are kind of old Hawaii style and touristy. There's also an area or two with bunch of resorts but overall the island isn't especially built up (really, not much of Hawaii is outside of Oahu). There's some mountains as well, including one that's known for stargazing, and a lot of beaches (some of which are very famous for surfing). While Maui lacks a lot of the events, shopping, and dining of Oahu (it has some, but certainly a lot less), it's fairly popular with tourists and also home to a number of famous singers, actors, and the like. I'll go into more detail about the island in the future, but that's the basics.

In this post, I'm going to talk a bit about how I and my family have been spending our time on Maui. Specifically, I'll be focusing on my parents' "farm" (well, more like a large garden). I'll talk about sightseeing and other parts of Maui in detail in future posts.
As previously mentioned, my parents got a place with a large fenced in farm/garden area which includes ducks, chickens, some monarch larvae, and lots of different fruit trees. While it's not really a full on farm, they keep fairly busy clearing brush and weeds, harvesting fruit, looking for eggs (the ducks and chickens don't always lay in their coops), planting some new things, and the like. Connie and I haven't done too much in that regard, though Zack likes to help feed the ducks. As for me, I cut down a banana tree. See, they not true trees and they only ever get one bunch of bananas so, if you want a steady crop, you have to cut down the tree once the bananas start to ripen and let a new one grow in its place. I also helped my mom get honey from the bee hive. It did involve dressing up in one of those bee keeper suits you've probably seen on TV, but my parents' hive is some fancy new design, which makes getting the honey out really easy. You basically remove a panel from the back, plug in a spigot, open up the gates for one column of the hive, and the honey flows right out. Very simple, though you have to wait a while for all the honey since there's so much of it. My mom and I emptied two columns (out of six) and ended up with a bit over a gallon.
The newest addition to the place is a tortoise, who they adopted from the humane society a few days after we arrived. Why a tortoise? Because it's cool, can live a long time, and requires virtually no work to take care of since it can eat the grass, weeds, and any discarded fruit. It's a male tortoise, six and a half years old, and already a pretty good weight (I've had to carry him from place to place a few times). He spent a lot of time hiding in his shell at first, but is starting to get more comfortable around people. For a while though, every day we basically played a round or two of find the tortoise, combing the entire area to see what obscure spot he'd hidden in.
While we have done some sightseeing (more on that in later entries), a lot of our time has been spent hanging out at my parents' place and keeping Zack amused. Fortunately, he likes the animals and there's a huge playground only ten minutes or so away. Unfortunately, this is in one of the rainier parts of the island and winter is the rainy season. As such, I don't think we've had a single 24 hours period without rain. Actually, anything less than half a day of rain has been pretty rare. We could always get out of the rain by going to other, dryer, parts of the island, but it did prevent us from enjoying the farm as much as we otherwise could have. Hopefully we'll get better weather the next time we come here. All in all though, it's been fun and fairly relaxing, just a bit wet.

Random Hawaii Comment: Maui Roads
Fortunately, thanks to a much lower population (both permanent and temporary), traffic on Maui is a whole lot better than Honolulu. The roads, however, often leave something to be desired. They're not bad if you stick to the most developed part of the coast, which encompasses areas like Kahului (the main town), Kihei, and Wailea (the fancy resort area), all of which I'll talk more about later. The speed limits are often a little lower than it feels like they should be, which leads to an extreme speeding problem (there are places where it seems like just about everyone is going 20+ over the limit), but the roads are pretty well laid out and easy to drive on. But once you get a little ways out in the country, things get a lot worse. The roads are barely wide enough for two cars (and some bridges aren't even that), feature tons of sharp curves (some with really poor visibility), and are often in sore need of repaving. This trip is the first time in years that I've had any real problem with car sickness. And, knowing how the Hawaii state government tends to work (or not work, to be more accurate), I don't think the roads here are going to improve any time soon.

We decided to spend out last day on Maui at the beach. We were originally planning to head back to Makena Beach, but my mom really wanted to try out Wailea Beach so we ended up there. It's a pretty nice stretch of beach as well. Not as long as some, and a little crowded, but with good sand and surf. It also turns out that the path along the beach goes far past the Grand Wailea. We walked on it quite a while, past lots of other fancy hotels, before turning back. It looked like it might actually go all the way to Kihei.
We spent a pleasant few hours there and, on the way back, stopped at another beach, but not to swim or lay out on the sand. Ho'okipa Beach is a relatively small beach out near Paia. It's kind of rocky and has a lot of waves so it's not a good spot for sunbathing or swimming, though some surfers seem to like it. Its real claim to fame, however, is that it's a popular hang out for sea turtles. Lots and lots of sea turtles. Yeah, that's pretty much all turtles in that photo. There's supposed to be larger numbers at night but there had to be 50 - 60 when we stopped by that afternoon. They were mostly just sleeping on the beach, though occasionally a new one would come up on shore or one of the ones on the beach would decide to go back in the water. That involved a lot of awkward shuffling as they tried to climb over each other to get where they wanted to go. While I've seen sea turtles before I'd never seen anywhere close to that many at once and it was pretty cool.

Random Hawaii Comment: Thoughts on Maui
Maui is certainly slower than Oahu and, while there, I missed the convenience and walkability of Honolulu and the heavy Japanese influence. That said, Maui has its charms as well. The small towns like Paia and Lahaina are fun to visit and, while Maui doesn't have anywhere near the restaurant selection of Honolulu, there are still some very good ones. Plus the beaches are great. Oahu is definitely the place to go if you want a lot of things to do but, if you're looking for a slower vacation with lots of beach time Maui is a pretty good choice. Connie and I both enjoyed it there more than we expected and look forward to going back.