Maui Day 1

Bindi and I flew out bright and early on Saturday morning around 7am. Our flight went to Phoenix before heading on to Maui, and since it was an international flight, we had to be there 2 hours ahead of time. I hate getting up when the first number on the clock is a '5', let alone when it's a '4'!!! Painful, but I did it. Once at the airport, we checked in and went through security and customs. After that, we didn't have that long to wait, but we did manage to get a Starbucks each before boarding. The flight was decent enough, although the US Airways planes are really old compared to all the Air Canada and Westjet planes I've been on recently. I think this one was from the 80's sometime. It was definately more uncomfortable and crowded than newer planes, something that we noticed about all the flight to and from Maui (even with United airplanes, too). Here's a picture of Bindi and I on the first flight, with Snuggles, Bindi's boyfriend's travel critter that we brought along with us.
In Phoenix, we had about 2.5 hours before our next flight, so we had an early lunch at a pub in the airport. Soon we were on our flight to Kahului, Maui, duration of 5 hour 40 minutes. This flight, too, was sort of crowded but I didn't mind so much because I was keen to arrive at our destination! The only bump along the way was an actual BUMP, when we hit some turbulence. I know, most people have hit turbulence while on an airplane, but this turbulence was sudden and some of the most severe I've ever experienced. The plane didn't just bounche a bit, it actually dropped several times - enough to make your stomach drop out a little! On the last, big drop, several people actually screamed! It was pretty scary and one of the only times I thought I might actually be on a plane that crashed!

In the end, we left the troublesome cloud system and it was all clear from there. Shortly thereafter, we landed on luscious Maui and entered tropical land!!

After collecting our luggage, we picked up our rental car, which turned out to be a "lovely" Chevrolet HHR, as seen below but ours was gold:It's basically the response to the PT Cruiser, but way crappier. Anyway, it got us around and it was decent on gas. We headed out of Kahului towards the Kaanapali area, on the west coast of Maui.It was only a 45 minute drive, and we stopped on the way at one viewpoint to take some nice pictures of the ocean:That's Bindi down there:The weather was gorgeous! It was probably about 25-28 degrees Celsius all week. We continued on to our hotel, stopping in Lahaina along the way for some dinner and the tail end of happy hour at a little restaurant. By the time we actually reached our hotel just after 7:30pm, it was already dark, so we didn't really get a good view of the area until the next day. However our hotel room was nice and we settled in quickly, since we were pretty tired from all our travels.