Maui Vacation 2011

Yesterday we went tooling about and ended up at the A&B Sugar Museum in Kahului.  It was interesting and told the history of Hawaii’s sugar industry from settlement to present day.  They also had a video which showed the process of making sugar.  NEAT.

Here you can see Susanne standing under one of the huge claws they use to haul sugar cane rows up out of the fields and onto big trucks to be processed.  The other photo above is a set of the rollers that are used in the processing area.  These crush down the sugar cane and squeeze juices from them.

After the Sugar Museum we headed down Hwy 30 to Maalaea which is home to the Maui Ocean Center and Maui’s largest aquarium.  This place was really cool.  The (self guided) tour includes stepping “down” through the different levels of the reef to see what fish are in that area as well as shark and jelly fish tanks.

After the aquarium we had lunch at Beach Bums BBQ below the Ocean Center.  You’ll notice I’m not providing a link or a photo for this and that’s because it just isn’t worth it.  The food was medium and the drinks were overly sweet and syrupy.  🙁  You can’t win ’em all I suppose.  I feel we’ve done pretty good food wise since we got here.

We finished lunch and it was hot out so we decided to go for a swim.  We first drove out to Secret’s beach which some local’s gave us directions to.  It’s a really neat beach with three distinct areas, one even allows nudity.  The only issue was, the surf was really high and there wasn’t much beach left to hang out on.  We stuck around for a little while but thought we might have better luck at Makena beach.  Makena was fun and the surf was insane… 6′ – 8′ high waves were breaking off shore.  Surfers and Boogie Boarders were stoked.  Susanne and I took the trail over to Little Makena beach and played in the water.  The power of the tide is amazing when the surf is up like that.  We played in the waves; ducking under and trying to stand up against the water moving back and forth until we got tired.  We laid out on the beach a while but the surf was so strong that it pressed water up all the way to the tree line of the beach so we packed up and made the journey back to Big Makena and home.

The walk back was interesting because the beginning of the trail is partly under water 50% of the time.  You have to time your entrances and exits right or you’ll get soaked!  At the top of the trail that connects Little Makena to Big Makena there is a beautiful viewpoint…

When we got home we dined on a lovely meal of leftovers from several of our restaurant trips.  It was actually nice to have little tastes of a bunch of things.