Maui!

Almost a year ago, probably, two of my friends from undergrad (they're twins) told me that their family would most likely be coming to Hawaii for their dad's 60th birthday this year. Well, it happened! And when two of your best friends from 5,000 miles away are going to be just a few islands over, you book a flight! So I booked a flight to Maui and spent a few days crashing their family vacation. It was a blast!

First of all, Maui is really different from Oahu. There aren't nearly as many people, which I think is great. People overwhelm me. (That's why I hate New York. People everywhere.) So right away, I liked Maui.

We stayed in a condo on the beach, so the first day I was there, we just relaxed on the beach. It was so nice after a long semester!

It was a pretty little beach!

Oh, and we saw WHALES.

See them, those two tiny specks? WHALES.

 The second day, we took a bus tour of the Road to Hana, which is one of the things Maui is famous for. Hana is this little town on the side of the island far from everything else, and the road out there is very windy and absolutely incredibly beautiful. I was glad we took a bus tour because (a) our driver was really knowledgeable and told us all kinds of stories and legends and information, (b) I didn't get car sick!, (c) we stopped at all the good spots. It was about a 10 hour day, with lots of stops of course to take photos. I took about a billion, but here are some of the more interesting (I hope) ones:

Again, I took about 300 photos but... I don't want to bore you all with them! It's hard to take a good photo from a moving bus. But take my word for it: Maui is gorgeous.

Look at this fabulous crew I spent the trip with:

Here we are on the beach New Years Eve, when everyone else in the U.S. was firmly in 2015 and we were still in the Old Year:

Coming home from Maui was a bit of a catastrophe. My flight was delayed for 6 million hours, and the airline I was flying was absolutely awful about keeping up informed. I finally got home after midnight and there was a raging windstorm on Oahu, which was actually pretty cool. 

Anyway, that was my first experience with island-hopping and I would definitely recommend it! The islands are very different and there is so much too!