On Thursday, I skipped the morning session of the conference altogether! Bindi and I were excited, because we were planning on driving the highway out to Hana, which was supposed to be very beautiful! As a reminder, her is the map of Maui:
We stopped at Ho'okipa Beach Park on the way to Hana and watched the surfers for awhile. It was pretty hard to take pictures of the surfers, but here is the beach:
The drive to Hana started out fairly well. It was very scenic and we stopped shortly after starting to hike in to a waterfall. We climbed in over the tree roots and through the mud:
Bindi in front of waterfall:
Quick snap shot of the two of us before biting bugs chased us out of there:
As we drove along the winding road, we save a number of bamboo forests, which were very very cool. We walked inside one of them for a little ways before we decided it was too muddy.
Throughout our drive we saw some very cool trees, which you can see below. They were very cool because they had these neat orange flowers on their tops!
We saw several of these neat, wild roosters kicking around:
We also some several more waterfalls, and lots of lush jungly scenery:
As we drove along the windy highway and saw all the amazing sights, something started dawning on me. "Something" being called MOTION SICKNESS!!!! I started getting a little ill about halfway into our 4 hour drive - I actually lasted quite long, considering the type of road we were dealing with. At some places, there was only enough room for one lane, so we would have to slow down and check to make sure no traffic was coming from the other direction. Here's an example of the roads/bridges we traversed:
The last leg of our journey into Hana took us around the cliffs seen below:
The scary part about these cliffs was the rain storm that started pelting us as we drove along! The amount of rain that came down was amazing! It didn't last long, though.
Eventually we made it to Hana (a little town of NOTHING!!), where we found the one restaurant in town and had some lunch. Even Bindi was feeling ill after that drive, and she had been driving the car the whole time! Having planned poorly and left my gravol at home, we stopped at the general store and picked up some motion sickness pills for me. I popped the recommended two and drifted off as Bindi started heading back along the highway of sickness. My stomach was pretty settled for awhile, but since Bindi just wanted to get the heck out of there, she was taking the corners pretty hard and doing her best to get us home quickly. After an hour and a half of this, my stomach got a little queasy again, so I took one more of the itty bitty pills. I felt fine again and we made it out of the danger zone an hour after that.
As we drove the rest of the way back to Ka'anapali, however, those little pills I took starting to have a different effect. All of a sudden I felt super tired, so I put the car seat back and fell asleep solid for the remainder of the trip. But, as I woke up to trek into the hotel, I felt super....well, the only word for it is 'stoned'! I could barely move and I felt super heavy. I was so tired, and I dragged me and my stuff up to my room. I took off my shoes and crawled into bed while still wearing my clothes, whereupon I slept for 3.5 hours. Since we only got home at 7pm, this meant I woke up at 10:30 - unfortunately, I wasn't feeling much better, just a little hungry! The hotel restaurant was already closed and the only food we had in our hotel room was some yogurt and chocolate covered macadamian nuts, both of which I chowed down before crashing into bed (in my pj's this time) until 7am the next morning. Phew, I was soooo glad when I felt better the next day!
Yes, we made her wear a santa hat. This picture was taken half a second after my mom let go of her. The hat didn't stay on much longer, but we got the shot at least!
One of the weirder things that Muffin did while we were there, was sit in the tub after someone had had a shower. I suppose it was warm, but it was still wet! Weird cat.
