Maui

Hawaii’s legislature approved gay marriage and the state’s governor signed it into law while Lynn and I were vacationing on Maui earlier this month. I’m not saying my wearing a Human Rights Campaign tank top one morning was the difference maker, but you must concede that it’s a pretty big coincidence.

At any rate, that’s my segue into an account of our historic trip, during which I added Hawaii to my “running states” list, we (atypically for an Abbott-Ries vacation) encountered no cold weather save at 10,000-plus feet, and Lynn actually wore a bathing suit—any of those things being so notable as perhaps to have made the national news. (So, please excuse me if I repeat things you may already have read in print or online in the New York Times or the Washington Post, or which may have been Tweeted or re-Tweeted to you.)

There’s a lot of ground to cover—literally, since Hawaii insists on being something like 4800 miles away from the DC area. Let’s break it down by sections. And no, I’m not starting with the scenery. Which was spectacular, but I’ll get to that.

The Flights

All told, we spent something like 18 to 20 hours in the air, with brief layovers in Los Angeles on the way and San Francisco coming back. I was deeply concerned for Lynn, given that the concept of multi-ton vehicles defying gravity always has unnerved her, and also because her history of having drowning nightmares seemed ill-suited to soaring high above thousands of miles of water. She was determined, however, to self-affirm rather than self-medicate, telling herself that she no longer was that petrified person fatalistically awaiting the Final Splashdown. And by God, it worked.

It undoubtedly helped that we had movies to distract us. Lynn had figured out how to rent and download films onto our computer, and we ended up watching three of them. The best was Sound City, ex-Nirvana and current Foo Fighters drummer Dave Grohl’s affectionate look at a legendary California recording studio, its pioneering Neve soundboard, and the good old days of pre-digital recording, when you actually had to have some talent in order to be a rock or pop star. It’s kind of hard to focus on dying in a plane crash when you’re hearing the likes of Grohl, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Paul McCartney and Stevie Nicks reminisce and play their music. And, of course, we were among the choir members to whom Grohl was preaching his “everything was better before technology ate the world” message. (Even though, admittedly, we were watching the flick on an iPad, with our iPhones in our pockets. We never said we were entirely consistent.)

We also read on the flights. During the course of our vacation I started and finished Richard Ford’s Canada, which I loved, and which I urge you to read if you like spare and somber stories about young boys whose lives are forever altered by their parents’ poor decisions and the violence that’s always just a few missteps away from what otherwise might have been a happy childhood. Trust me, it’s a great book. And it’s set in Montana and Saskatchewan—the kinds of cold, underpopulated, scantily touristed places to which Lynn and I more typically travel. Anyway, I recently read a Q&A in the New York Times in which Amy Tan called Canada her favorite book of 2013, although it actually was published in 2012. I’ve never read a word of Amy Tan’s writing, but she’s an acclaimed bestselling author, so maybe you’ll take her word if not mine.

So, where was I? Oh yes, very slowly getting to Maui, the putative subject at hand. Lynn brought food on the planes, so we also spent part of our time eating Tofurky sandwiches and carrot sticks and pita chips with hummus. (In this diet we somehow seemed to be alone.) All that masticating was a welcome distraction from the fact that I felt so straitjacketed by our accommodations that at times I wished I’d been born without legs rather than half of an arm. Count me among those who are delighted that public sentiment seems to be firmly against the airlines allowing people to take and make in-flight phone calls on their cell phones. I fear that no amount of faux meat or diverting documentaries could quell my impulse to throttle such self-important bloviators.

A TSA employee had been murdered by a crazed gunman at the Los Angeles airport just days before we touched down there, prompting me to note that “LAX” is not the ideal identifier for a transportation hub whose security has been fatally breached. Still, we ultimately arrived in Kahului, Maui, without incident either in the air or on the ground, except for that thing where I felt I’d been stuffed into a tiny packing box for a good chunk of an entire day.

The airport in Kahului is relatively small and easily manageable. But I’d thought that someone was supposed to adorn us with leis as we de-boarded onto Hawaiian soil (or carpet, technically). I mean, I’d seen such welcomings depicted by reputable news sources such as an old Brady Bunch episode. Alas, however, no leis. Maybe you need to be on a Hawaiian airliner instead of United. Or perhaps the whole “I got lei’d!” joke simply has gotten so old and stale at this point that nobody has the heart anymore to provoke it.

The Runs

I suppose I should’ve renamed this section. To be clear, while Lynn did contract a cold late in our time on Maui, our stools were utterly unaffected by the change of scenery and climates.
 
As I’d noted in an earlier post, probably the biggest reason we headed to Hawaii was because I have this goal of completing at least one uninterrupted run of an hour’s duration in each of the 50 states, and Hawaii was the farthest-flung of the 18 states I still needed. (Why the island of Maui, as opposed to, say, Oahu? Because Lynn wanted to attend a two-day workshop there that was being led by a renowned Reiki master. And because we didn’t give much of a crap about seeing the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, or Waikiki Beach, or any of the other big Hawaii tourist sites. Which, by the way, appalled my mom. “But, you’re going all that way!” she cried out on the phone when I announced there would be no island-hopping. Sorry, mom.)

We spent our first night on Maui at a hotel in Kahului, which I consistently called “Babalui,” in a totally hilarious spin on the name of fictional bandleader Ricky Ricardo’s biggest hit from the 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy. Oddly, Lynn consistently found this not even slightly funny. Kahului is where the airport and a lot of retail shopping is located, so it’s un-pretty by Maui standards. But it’s hardly without its charms. And by that I don’t just mean the charms of the Whole Foods where we ate or purchased several meals at the beginning and end of our vacation, but also of the majestic hills beyond the Whole Foods shopping center, the palm trees and tropical flowers all around town, and the shoreline rife with surfers. (Even on one stretch that’s across the bay from a container yard for cargo ships.)

Our first morning on the island, Friday the 8th, I acted on  tip from the hotel’s front desk and ran beside a busy road for about a mile, then up a side road into a city park. (Turning the corner, I passed the Maui Arts & Cultural Center, which was heavily promoting an upcoming performance by 1970s hitmaker Boz Scaggs. This gave me a pretty good idea of your concert-going horizons when you’re situated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and don’t live in a major population center like Honolulu.) As I ran through the park, I was struck, as one often is in far-off locales, by the clear disconnect between local perceptions of the weather and one’s own. Even just past sunrise, the temperature was in the low 80s, the humidity was moderate to high, and the expected tropical breezes were nowhere to be felt. I basically was sweating my ass off, yet a number of the Mauians I saw running or strolling by had track suits on—and seemed quite comfortable, at that.

I’d been hoping the park was going to be sprawling and lush, but it was small and utilitarian. It didn’t take me long to circle the baseball field, basketball courts and parking lots, so I proceeded up a hill and into a neighborhood of modest homes, zigging and zagging along until I’d killed enough time to be able to head back to the hotel. It wasn’t exactly like the evocative runs I’d had in such otherworldly places as Iceland and northern Newfoundland, but it was good enough to earn me, at 7:35 am local time, the right to cross Hawaii off my running list as state number 33.

Afterward, Lynn and I walked over to Whole Foods for a celebratory tour of the breakfast bar, with its many vegetarian and vegan offerings. No one congratulated me or vied to pick up my bill. But then, most things travel slowly on the islands. Including news.

My runs on mornings two and three were in Hana, which is about 50 miles east of Kahului via the grandiosely named “Highway to Hana”—a two-lane road that’s frequently so narrow you must stop to let opposing traffic pass. (More on that road in the “Scenery” section.) In terms of commercial activity, Hana is the anti-Kahului. The retail touchstone of the crossroads that qualifies as “downtown” is the ramshackle Hasegawa General Store, which sells everything from beer to bolts. There’s a lone restaurant, a gas station and, a slight distance up a side road, a smaller grocery store and a post office. Nearby are two churches and a resort hotel that was far too expensive for us, so I got even by trespassing on its grounds during both of my Hana runs.

There’s not a lot of traffic in Hana at any time, at least not in November, and certainly not before 8 am. Which was good, because the dearth of road choices forced me to run beside the aforementioned “highway” for stretches. The vegetation was lush—lots of palm trees and tropical plants whose names I don’t know—and the terrain was much more densely forested than I’d had any idea Maui would be. The first morning in Hana I checked out the town beach, which is black-sand, well-shaded and host to very rough waves—all of which combines to make the place a little foreboding. The second morning I ran down a back road to the combination high school-elementary school, which is low-slung, old and dated, but features colorful murals on the cinderblock walls of heroic Hawaiian figures in native dress. I saw and heard a lot of wild chickens, which you see all over the island. Most of the few people I passed on the streets said hello or good morning, which doesn’t happen much at home.

No run on morning four on Maui, because we wanted to be atop the Haleakala volcano before every other tourist on the island had the opportunity to join us there, and it was a two-hour drive away. Our ultimate destination that day was Lahaina, which is on the west coast, is a port for cruise ships, and was an adjustment for us after two full days in sleepy Hana.

I beat most of the tourists outside on morning five, however, and started my Lahaina run at the massive banyan tree next to our hotel, which swallows an entire square block of real estate. From there, I headed away from the commercial center, across a highway that was busy even at 7 am, and up a hill in search of the “L” sign I’d seen when Lynn and I were out walking the previous afternoon. It was as if the town had wanted to emulate Los Angeles’s Hollywood sign but couldn’t afford all the letters. I wanted to see what the L looked like up close. But I never could find a road that would take me to it. I hit multiple dead ends and ended up passing a lot of kids waiting for school busses and residents of low-end apartment complexes heading off to work. Running back toward the hotel, I saw a Kaiser Permanente health care facility and thought about how, while I always carry my driver’s license so authorities can identify my body should I be hit by a car or keel over, my Kaiser card remained in my wallet back at the hotel. Fortunately, I didn’t need it.

When I finished my run at the banyan tree, tourists already were lining up at the waterfront for day excursions, and breakfasters were filling the streets. I was happy not to have had to share the roads with many of them.

Morning six was our last on Maui, and we were back at our original hotel in Kahului. This time I decided not to turn off at the road that led to the park, but rather to just keep going up the busy four-lane road that later narrowed to two. The shoulder was plenty wide at all points, and I had the bay to my left on the way back, but it wasn’t exactly a Chamber of Commerce-friendly route. I ran up a hill and past an array of forlorn shops and small businesses. What was interesting to me, though, were the number of bars, restaurants and dedicated spaces offering karaoke, which I knew from having been there is huge in Japan. As I’d seen in Tokyo, there even were karaoke-specific rental spaces. I wondered if Hawaiians sing better than I do (well, that’s almost a given), and exactly how much spiked Hawaiian punch fuels these parties and open-mic competitions.

The Scenery

OK, all right, already. If you haven’t ever been to Maui/Hawaii, what you probably wanted to know from the get-go was, exactly how gorgeous is it? The answer is “extremely,” but I’ve been stalling—in part because I wanted to address other things first (and it’s my blog), but also because I have a lousy descriptive vocabulary and there’s really no way I can do the island justice.

It would help if I knew how to add photos to this blog, which probably isn’t that difficult to do. But I’m lazy, and, anyway, I sort of dig how this space is so low-tech as to be, to modern-day branding, as the 8-track tape is to the iPod. Also, Lynn shot down the idea of my posting here the link to an online album of our collective photos. She told me she didn’t want “the whole world” seeing them. Meaning, given the size of my readership, that she apparently deems Earth’s population to be about a dozen people. I personally think it’s because Lynn fears those bathing suit shots of her somehow will go viral, perhaps on the website “Pasty-White Visions,” if there is such a place. If you aren’t some cyber-rascal looking to embarrass the missus, shoot me an e-mail and I’ll give you the link. Pending spousal approval, of course.

Anyway, the scenery. Well, let’s first consider the previously mentioned highway to Hana, which for about 30 of its miles twists, turns, peaks and valleys, through and around and beside some of the most amazing forests and stretches of coastline I wager you’ll ever see. There are overlooks and pullovers where you can stop and take pictures of waterfalls and exotic foliage and waves crashing against rocks. That’s why—with all the stops, slowdowns at one-lane bridges, and hairpin turns—you really can’t drive from Kahului to Hana in less than three hours.

I shot my only iPhone video—it’s seven seconds long and opens with a great shot of my hand—at the site of an apparent memorial among the rocks at ocean’s edge. It features two crosses and a surfboard. It’s starkly beautiful. I assume it means a surfer died there, but I suppose it could’ve been left by one of the Beach Boys or the Ventures, in loving memory of those heady days when surf music sold lots of records.

Lynn’s workshop was at the home of this big-name Reiki guy who lives just outside Hana. We’d taken a test drive over there on the afternoon before it started to ensure we could find the place—street signs on Maui being a hit-or-miss proposition. (GPS won’t work in Hana, not that we had any such device.) We were glad we’d previewed the trip, because the guy’s half-mile-long “driveway” actually is two ruts with raised mounds of tall grass in between. We were driving a tin-can Mazda 2, which has the horsepower of, well, a horse, and about two inches of ground clearance. At least that was what it felt like as we climbed the hill to the house for the first time. I pictured us trying to explain to the Hertz people at the airport why we had no muffler and our undercarriage appeared to be on a vegetarian diet.

But the payoff was arriving at the extraordinary modernist house and looking down on the countryside and the sea. If you should end up seeing our photos, there are some great ones Lynn took while she was on the premises.

Lynn’s workshop was all day both days, so I used that time to do some exploring. The first day I drove southeast about 15 miles (which again, took longer than you’d think), past the coastal entrance (as opposed to the volcano entrance) to Haleakala National Park. Again, it was beautiful. Lush. Exotic. Other descriptive adjectives. I then drove back to our rental cabin, donned my bathing suit and bodysurfed the waves for about an hour at Hamoa Beach, which is hidden from the roadway—down a flight of stone steps. It was lovely and peaceful, and there were only a few people there. The fancy-pants hotel has a cabana at Hamoa, next to the dingy public restroom. The friendly cabana attendant introduced me to his pit bull and let me rinse my sandy feet at the hotel’s spigot.

The second day of Lynn’s workshop, I drove back to the national park. This time I stayed, and took a two-mile hike to the Waimoku waterfall. The path up a gradual incline takes you across cascading streams and through primordial bamboo forests. At times I was all alone, standing in near-darkness at midday within the tight canopy, with a breeze on my face and the sounds of creaking bamboo all around me. It was amazing. And the waterfall was breathtaking. I took a “selfie” there, which I later sent to friends captioned “Sweaty Geezer Achieves Goal.”

After that I drove a few miles further away from Hana, in search of the burial place of Charles Lindbergh, which I knew from a guidebook was in the small cemetery of a church on a back road. Eventually I found it. Everything about the place is modest—the church, the cemetery, the simple plaque that reads “Charles A. Lindbergh. Born Michigan1902. Died Maui 1974. ‘If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uppermost parts of the sea … .” C.A.L.”  The verse is from the Bible—Psalm 139:9.

The simple graveyard is an incredibly peaceful place, and it’s abutted by a small public park on a bluff that overlooks some of the most striking ocean views I saw anywhere on the island. I don’t know nearly as much about Lindbergh as I should, given his outsized place in 20th century history as aviator hero, victim of a sensational crime, suspected Nazi sympathizer, and, finally, complex figure whose very name tends to divide those familiar with his legacy. But I know that he chose his burial site for its remoteness, beauty and quiet. He certainly got that right.

A different kind of beauty and calm awaited Lynn and me at the Haleakala summit, which was socked in by fog when we arrived by car late Monday morning, November 11th. We couldn’t see the volcano crater down below, but it was an incredible feeling to be up among the clouds, wearing coats and bracing ourselves against cold winds and temperatures in the 40s when it was sunbathing weather 10,000 feet below us. We snapped shots of the fog-shrouded rocks and scrub vegetation, and we took each other’s picture at the elevation sign. Then we proceeded on from chilly and quiet Haleakala to sultry, bustling Lahaina.

Though it’s touristy and coastal, Lahaina hardly is Myrtle Beach or Ocean City. The retail elements are tastefully laid out along a couple of main roads. It’s compact and walkable. There’s that huge banyan tree, and an abundance of trees and flowers. The sunrises and sunsets over the water are beautiful. We in no way felt we were ending our wondrous journey around the island by staying at a glorified mall.

I do wish I’d made it up closer to that “L,” though. Which the Internet tells me stands for Lahainaluna (“overlooking Lahaina”) High School, is 30 feet high, and sits at the 2,000-foot level of Mt Ball in the West Maui Mountains. It’s been there since 1904, which means it predated the Hollywood sign by 19 years.

The Accommodations

Lynn had done all of our lodgings research. Our top criteria were location (near the airport coming and going, near Lynn’s Reiki training in Hana, and one night in happenin’ Lahaina), cost (ideally under $200 a night), and fairly basic amenities such as WiFi access and perhaps a pool. In each case our expectations were far exceeded.

The Maui Seaside Hotel in Kahului, just two miles from the airport, met not only all our criteria for convenience (it also is within easy walking distance of the Whole Foods I’d mentioned earlier), but it also has a beautiful central courtyard with a manicured lawn, views of the bay and a spacious pool that descends to a depth of seven feet. The water was cold, and Lynn would not join me. (This would be a theme throughout our trip.) My presence in the pool proved sufficient to frighten off most would-be bathers, which was great. More room for me to propel myself underwater from one end of the pool to the other, a feat I always deem impressive in pools of a decent size, although I’m still awaiting the oohs and ahhs of onlookers after all these decades.

Returning to the Maui Seaside for our final night on the island felt like being embraced by an old friend. We even were upgraded to a bigger room at no extra cost for a reason I can’t recall. Maybe it was an overdue reward for my ability to hold my breath for an entire pool’s length.

After our arrival night in Kahului, we spent the next three nights in our own cottage in Hana. This was fantastic because it was private, gave us our own kitchen, living room and screened-in front porch, and was very near both “downtown” Hana and the home of Lynn’s Reki master, who had recommended the place in the literature he’d sent his students. My gratitude may in retrospect have been the reason I never once in conversation with Lynn referred to the Reiki guy—one William Lee Rand—as “David Lee Roth,” even though assigning him the name of the one-time Van Halen frontman would have been at least as hilarious as was the Kahalui-Babalui thing.

Really, it was so much fun to go off for the day—Lynn to Reiki, me to my hiking, swimming and sightseeing adventures—and to feel as if we literally were coming home. The cottage was perfect for us, even though it had no air conditioning. Ceiling fans and cooler nighttime temperatures did the trick.

Our other hotel on Maui, for one night only, was the Pioneer Inn in Lahaina, which we’d already known from a black-and-white greeting card we’d seen for sale in the general store in Hana is old and historic—built in 1901 on what once was the personal taro patch of King Kamehameha the Great. It’s a grand structure sitting on prime turf right on the waterfront, with porches adjoining each room on its two-story entrance side, the requisite wooden sea captain out front, and an evocative palm tree-framed interior courtyard with a pool as its centerpiece. The place’s glory has faded a bit, to be honest, but then that’s probably why we could afford it. So what if there was chipping paint here and there, and our room overlooked a dumpster? We still loved being there, feeling that the old girl looked pretty good for 102, and that we’d been delighted to have made her acquaintance.

The Food

OK, I’ll start by saying that we got the owner of the restaurant at the Maui Seaside to bring us a sample of poi—because, “when in Hawaii” and all that. Poi, which, per Webster’s, is “a Hawaiian food of taro root cooked, pounded, and kneaded to a paste and often allowed to ferment” generally is eaten with meat. We could see why it’s not meant to stand alone. It has the consistency of applesauce but not the flavor—or really much flavor at all.

This is going to be a short section (thank God, you’re no doubt saying, if you’ve given up your afternoon to follow me this far), because you know that, as a vegetarian/vegan couple,  we didn’t seek out a luau and eat pig suspended from a spit, or order any seafood. We could’ve grabbed a fresh coconut or pineapple from one of any number of roadside vendors, but we didn’t feel moved to do that either. We did indulge in coconut shave ice in Lahaina, but God knows if there’s any real coconut in that. During our one morning in Lahaina, we had a fantastic breakfast at the imaginatively named Café Café, where Lynn had granola with fresh fruit and I had fresh fruit with chia seeds and Gobi berries. (Lynn took some up-close food-porn photos of those dishes, which are on the aforementioned online site.)

Mostly we ate at Whole Foods or ate items bought from there. We did dine at a couple of nice Thai restaurants—one in Lahaina and the other in Kahului. I scored some Tootsie Roll Pops at the general store in Hana to enjoy on the road in my rental car (and to convey to other tourists what a badass I am).

The Climate

You wouldn’t weather think conditions could vary much on an island that’s only 48 miles long and 26 miles wide as the crow flies. (No, I’m not sure if Maui has crows. But, whatever. “Straight shot.” You know what I mean.) The fact is, though, that it rained like crazy much of the time we were in Hana on the east coast, but hardly at all anywhere else. A lot of the Hana rains came overnight, which certainly was preferable to during the day, but they often were accompanied by howling winds that made things quite noisy—even over the sounds of our white-noise machines and the ceiling fans.

In the Hana area, swells of rain often would arrive without warning, alternating with sunshine. Fortuitously, my entire hike to and from the Waimoku waterfall was rain-free. But precipitation did force me to bag a planned second trip to Hamoa beach.

Temperatures consistently were in the low 80s during the day and the 70s overnight. Which usually was quite comfortable. Atop the Haleakala volcano at 10,000-plus feet above sea level, however, it was quite autumnal, weather-wise. As you might imagine. The temperature was around 50 and wind-chills were in the low 40s, I’d guess.

The Wildlife

We never encountered the state bird—the Nene (pronounced nay-nay), a type of goose—anywhere other than on signage that dutifully notes their relative rarity. But we did see, I determined after we’d gotten home, several mongooses. They’re long, brown and sleek, and they dart across the road. You know they’re not squirrels because there are no squirrels on Maui. I didn’t know what I’d been looking at until I searched “Maui wildlife” and saw a photograph that matched the animal I’d seen.

Hawaii also is big on wild chickens and feral cats, and we saw plenty of each. I’ve no idea if mongooses eat cats, but I’m sensing a natural population-control cycle there.

Our friend Joanne who once lived in Hawaii says everything is bigger there—the plants because of all the rain and the wildlife because of the climate, the abundance of habitat and the lack of predators in some cases. Certainly our cottage in Hana hosted one of the biggest spiders I’d ever seen (on the front porch) and a magnificently large snail (inching his or her way across our driveway.) Again, we have pictures.

What else? It wasn’t whale-watching season, so we didn’t seek out any cetaceans. We saw many, many varieties of colorful and cacophonous birds, but did we know what we were looking at? No.

The End

Even after a magnificent vacation, it was good to get back home to our untidy house and its shedding animals. And even to return to fall in the Mid-Atlantic, as the temperature at Dulles Airport was a brisk 25 degrees when our plane touched down just after 6 am on Thursday the 14th of November. We’d both taken the rest of the week off from work and so could luxuriate in the memories.

Maui wasn’t our usual type of vacation, but we had a blast there. Will we ever seek out another tropical locale, minus the lure of its being an un-trod running state or a Reiki destination? (Lynn, by the way, enjoyed her training and was glad she’d done it, but didn’t feel the Master was quite all that.)  It’s not out of the question. Although frankly I hear a lot of colder-weather “M” places calling our name—Manitoba, Minnesota, Montana, Michigan. We’ll see. But we no longer can rule out places just because they’re warm and popular.