Tuesday, September 30, 2014

The Road to Hana

Three days into our trip Wes bought Lindsey a plane ticket and convinced her to come join us in Maui!
We decided to tackle the road to Hana after picking Lindsey up from the airport.  
We decided to go the non traditional route though so we could make a complete loop instead of out and back.  The roads were NUTS! 
There were no lines down the middle of the road and when there were they weren't even kinda painted straight.  It was like a big roller coaster ride with incredible views.
Our first stop was at the Seven Sacred Pools…but first let me take a selfie
Even the path to the pools was super cool
Brynne was having a hard time seeing the roots in the ground and would easily get tripped up so Izzy coached her all the way down. I can't even begin to count all the tender little ways that Iz looked out for Brynne on our trip. It was the sweetest thing. 
The pools empty into the ocean and the sight is awesome, but then you turn around and it's just stunning.
None of us could resist climbing in
Not even Brynne!
Cute Izzy was always up for adventure
She climbed over with Lindsey and the boys to the first set of falls
The only way to get there was scrambling on the rocks behind the first little falls
Izzy jumped with Lindsey
And then went for it on her own
Garrett did his best to convince Brynne to jump with him but with no luck
She was just as content as these two just hanging out on the rocks around the edges of the lower pool.
Drew flipped from a lower ledge
And Jeff dove
Then the boys found a higher jumping ledge
Wes
Garrett

Drew
and I had fun with that one.
But that wasn't quite enough adventure for these guys
They climbed over the falls
and dove into a pool we couldn't even see from below
It looked so crazy
I climbed up to check it out but decided it was a bit out of my comfort zone
Yikes!!
Always trying to find bigger and better and always a brother to egg them on. All three of my guys leapt from there!
Eventually Jeff convinced Brynne to jump with him
She liked it fine, but once was enough!
After a couple of hours we tore ourselves away knowing there was so much more we wanted to see.
There were a couple of spots that I really wanted to see but we drove right past them and I realized they were behind us too late.
We did however find the little road that lead us down to Wai'anapanapa State Beach
First we followed a path down to spring fed fresh water caves.
The boys dove into the icy water and followed some other visitors under water into another room of the cave that you could only get to  by swimming.
It was pretty cool!
But the coolest was walking down into this beach covered in black sand
A lot of it was more like tiny soft pebbles
And some much bigger chunks
But there was plenty of that powdery fine stuff we are used to but solid black

It was awesome!
All of the vivid colors just popped and the lucy greenery surrounding the rocks was unreal
We couldn't get over how cool it was!
Garrett and Iz splashed around in the water a bit

And found body surfing here to be pretty dang good


Drew scampered around exploring and climbing up rocks and trees

While I was content to just sit and take it all in with a totally different kind of sand between my special little toes ;)
We started loosing day light so decided to just finish out the beautiful drive on the Hana Hwy
There was so much to take and and so many stops I would have love to have made. In fact there was one we decided to come back to later in the week.
Before calling it a night and heading back to the hotel we decided to end our day properly with a stop at Ululani's for the best shave ice.
It really is that good
And left all of us smiling in spite of all the driving we had done!