Notes
Run:
Hilly and kinda spooky throwaway run today. I ran in the afternoon because we started at 5am for the road to Hana. Roads are scarce on this side of the island except for the busy and narrow Hana Highway so I was struggling to find a route to run. I thought I could run down the highway and take this road towards the coast that I saw on the map but I realized why tourists didn't go on this road. I was alone with the road and the sounds of the rainforest and came up on the Hana landfill and just past that was a road closed sign. I went past it and after turning a sharp corner, found myself face to face with a fucking cow. I almost shat my pants. No farm in sight - just a lone cow standing on the side of the road looking at me. I know they're not really aggressive animals but this seemed to be a wild cow and this fucker was BIG. I tuned around slowly and ran back up to Hana highway and ran around the town to make it 5. I went kinda quick cuz honestly it's kinda eerie here. Hana is a really small town and there is only one resort here so there aren't many tourists at this time of day. It's a gorgeous place but just felt a little spooked after that cow encounter.
Vacation:
We woke up at 4am to start our road to Hana today to beat the crowds. We booked an air bnb in Hana until Saturday, but it's not a typical place to stay on Maui. This side of the island has one road and Hana is the only town and it's very small and has one hotel/resort. Most people stay on the other side of Maui where the beaches and big towns are and then drive the road to Hana and back in a day. It was a one way ticket for us today. I'm kinda glad we got to stay here though because we get to beat the tourists to a lot of the cool attractions and experience a non-tourist stay. The drive was really fun honestly. It was very windy and the views were incredible. We stopped at a few places to do short hikes and see cool views of the coastline and rainforest. We bought an app that had a downloaded map and a tour guide that talked to us about where to go and Maui history. Claire didn't really want to get the app but we both really liked the guide, especially because we could just have him tell us where to go. We also learned about how the chief of East Maui married the daughter of West Maui in order to unite the two sides and prevent a civil war and other wholesome shit like that about the Hawaiians. There was one stop at a state park that (apparently) had really cool black sand beaches, but we got there and were told that we needed to pay for reservations online beforehand. We looked online once we got service again and it was booked for a week so that bummed Claire out a bit (me too, but she was the one who planned that stop so she felt guilty). We got to Hana at like noon and our check in was at 3 so we had some time to kill. I guess we didn't need to wake up at 4am.... So we grabbed lunch at some food trucks - Claire's poke cheered her up a bit from the state park reservation snafu - and went to a beach that was tucked into this beautiful bay with black lava rocks splitting waves and lush green cliffs. The waves were huge. We swam for a bit and it was super fun just trying to survive. You could never take your focus away from the next wave. There was some Hawaiian child who couldn't be more than 10 surfing circles around everyone else with ease. I would've showed him up if I brought my board. Lucky kid. I ran after we checked in, then we looked up places to get dinner. Literally everything except the resort restaurant was closed or closing and it was 5:30. I guess that shows how most tourists already headed back from Hana. So we went to the resort restaurant and the hostess said it was a 90 minute wait. Our stomachs didn't have that kind of time so we settled with microwaved meals from the grocery store. I got gourmet fettucine alfredo and fanta and Claire got indian. You know, it wasn't bad but didn't quite make the top of our food list. So far my top 3 are the "Loco Moco" skillet from yesterday's brunch, the chicken sandwich from the food truck today, and the cinnamon roll in Kihei. Claire's are tacos from a food truck, tacos from a restaurant, and the same cinnamon roll. It was a damn good cinnamon roll. We capped off the day with double checking all the rest of our planned stops and hikes in Hawaii to make sure we had reservations and shit. Solid day. The travel logs are getting longer and longer aren't they