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!