Honeymoon @ the Sheraton in Maui, Hawaii

It’s Wednesday at about noon in Maui.. I thought I should blog about our trip so far.

So after the wonderful (!!) wedding at Harrah’s we set out to Maui.  On Friday before the wedding Japan got hit with a tsunami that totally wrecked Japan, but did only a small amount of damage to Hawaii.  We were kinda freaking out that morning, but it all worked out.

We got on the plane at KCI and landed in Fort Worth.  Unfortunately about then I started feeling bad.  I thought it was just booze lag from the reception, but it’s a head cold… no good.  The plane to Hawaii was a little late getting ready, but about an hour later than we were supposed to we were off.  In flight movies were some movie about equal pay for equal work in Britain and The Last Airbender.  Easily the worst movies I’ve ever seen in my life, but who cares?  Other than that, the flight on American Airlines was much better than I was used to.  Two big thumbs up for them and their airplanes.

We started to land and I couldn’t equalize because of my head cold.  Omg.. ow.  That hurt.  We got down and everyone was very far away sounding and my head was pounding, so that was awesome.  It started to get a little better, but never did clear up that night.  We opted to get a round-trip shuttle ride instead of renting a car from the airport to the hotel, because all our activities were very close to the hotel.

The drive was amazing.  Whales shooting up out of the massive ocean on your left, huge volcano on your right side.  Everything is a bright color of green, blue, red and purple.  Other islands loom on the horizon over the water.  The Molokini crater sticks out.  Lots of boats and fishermen.  Totally awesome just to sight see and not have to pay attention to the road, which totally demanded it.

We got to our hotel.  In a word: wow.  You really can’t imagine a more beautiful hotel with a more amazing view.  Everything we saw on our drive up here x1000.  It’s worth every penny, which of course they welcome :)   That is to say, it’s expensive here for sure.  You’ll spend $!00 for dinner for 2 easy.  $10 on a drink.  Activities start at about $150 per person, but everyone is so nice and will bend over backwards to make sure you have fun, and it’s all very special.  Totally worth it.  The view from our room is unobstructed ocean that goes until it hits the horizon.  It’s very quiet here.  Not a ton of people, especially up on the Black Rock, which is where we are.  There are 3 elevators (from our room to the lobby take elevator to 3, walk across breezeway, take elevator to 8, walk across another breezeway that’s more enclosed (and WOW what a view), and then go down to 1, walk across the pool and restaurant area, and go up a floor to the completely open air lobby.  Never seen anything like it before in my life.  Amazing.

We had dinner at the local steak place.  I was miserable during the thing though.  I couldn’t hear myself talk, ears popping like crazy, nose running, coughing my brains out.  Not an awesome way to start off.  We went to bed with the door open, ocean crashing against the Black Rock .. so peaceful… no other sounds.

Woke up pretty early (4 hours difference -10 GMT here instead of -6 in MO).  I was still terrible, coughing so hard my head hurt, head in a vice.  We had to make the executive decision to skip the diving.  Reading the Internets, diving with a cold beyond like 20 ft is crazy.  You can’t equalize, your head will be in the worst vice ever, and you risk some pretty bad injury (ruptured ear drum, blown lung).  I was so so (so) looking forward to that, but it came down to do I want to continue to relax and get better or run the very real risk of hurting myself and not having a good time the rest of the time.  Since we booked through the hotel, we were able to cancel.  However I still feel sad when I see people suiting up for SCUBA downstairs and pool side, and know that I can’t do it.  Just to prove it to myself I went down about 4ft in the pool.  Ow :(

We went to breakfast.  Our trip includes all our breakfasts for free.  Uh.. amazing breakfast!  It’s like Granite City breakfast buffet, but with like the freshest fruit and fish too.  Also awesome.

Anyway, Tuesday we did zip lining.  Popped a few cold pills right before we went, and I felt great.  The adrenaline also helps :)   That was awesome.  We have lots of pictures and a video of Shannon from that.  We had a Pink Floyd concert on the way up to the ziplines.. probably to try and freak us out a little :)   We got out of the first van right at “and the worm ate in to his brain!”  Of course, I thought it was awesome.  A guy proposed to his girlfriend in our group!  I have some pictures of that.  The guides were amazing.. so nice and so knowledgeable.  They kept it fun and safe.  Getting hurt via falling is probably one of my biggest fears, and so it was a little rough walking to the first zipline, but I could see it was very safe and there’s was no way that was going to happen, no way possible, so I was fine.  We did 8 lines, each progressively longer.  Probably doing about 30 mph over a canyon.. pretty awesome :)

Came back after a couple hours of that and sat and watched the Black Rock dive ceremony that happens every night at sunset.  Had a bunch of $10 drinks and some Mahi Mahi (trying to each as much seafood as I can here, cuz I know it’ll be good and won’t kill me here), it was good.. like a fish burger :)

Overnight I got an amazing shot of the moon reflecting off the ocean outside our window.  I mean the night sky down here and the ocean makes me feel like this place is made for me.

Today we are just chilling.  Official chilling day.  We are getting a massage here at 3 over looking the Black Rock and the beach, and then doing Teppan Yaki tonight for dinner.   Both inside the hotel.  We might walk next door down the beach to buy some alcoholic supplies, because you can only buy drinks here.

Tomorrow is ocean day.  We are going to snorkel around the reef here (which happens to be one of the best places to do that in Hawaii).  We have our masks, snokels, and wetsuits so we will put them to use… we just have to rent fins, which is right next to where we jump in.  There are some massive turtles out there and supposedly you can hear the whales too.  We’ve only seen their sprays so far.

Anyway.. that’s what I know so far.. I look forward to tomorrow… I really want to get in there and see what’s going on.