Well, the booking elves have been busy (read Sue, as she is our official booker).   (I found this out accidentally, when Steven said, “Did you book that? You’re the booker.”) We broke down the trip by day and then started to work through our list of possible adventures.  Some of them we don’t need to book–hiking, visiting Haiku/Paia, driving the road to Hana, etc., but for others, it was time to pull out the iPad and laptop and start to make reservations.

There are a few things we had to be aware of when we started planning.

1. We have only 2 full free days on Maui, 2 days we have work events (one dinner & one breakfast).
2. We can’t go up Haleakala and scuba dive on consecutive days as it isn’t safe.
3. We can’t fly for 18 hours after a scuba dive.
4. Most trips on Maui seem to start early (7-7:30 am)–especially the ones on the water. (I don’t like the morning, especially on vacation.)

This is our schedule before we started booking things. (Get used to spreadsheets; Steven LOVES them. This hardly counts.):

Day
1	Arrive on Maui at about 5 pm
2	Work dinner at 7 pm
3	Work meeting (Steven only) 9 am
4
5
6	Flight to Oahu 1 pm
7
8
9	Flight home 1 pm

 

Sunrise on Haleakala and then a 23-mile bike ride down the mountain

WOW!  This starts really really really early–can’t they reschedule sunrise for a more reasonable time?  We are on vacation!  We need to be at the departure point at 3:30 am.  UGH!  After a little discussion, we realized that Maui is 5 hours behind our home time zone and figured that if we did this trip the first morning (Day 2), our bodies would think it was 8:30 am.  So we booked it–I will let you know on the day if we are fooling ourselves on this one. (Steven neglects to mention that he then told a friend/work colleague that we would have drinks and dinner with him and his wife after we arrive in Maui. So, late night, early morning given that we won’t get to the hotel until 7ish.)

Kayak to Molokini

I emailed one of the places to understand how hard a 3.5-mile (each way) kayak trip would be.  The reply came back: “It is really good for triathletes.”  I am more of a “try athlete”–you know I try to be an athlete, but not really hard, because then I sweat and might spill my drink.  We pass.

Sunset kayak tour

We could only find one place that did this and not on the days that we were available…strike 2 for kayaking.

Scuba

After poking around for a while, we found a dive shop on Oahu that looks good.  Only 6 people per dive, two-tank discover diving trip, they have their own boat, and they have lots of good reviews on TripAdvisor.  But more importantly, they have a great name & logo – Reef Pirates – which any real diver will tell you is the right way to pick a dive shop.   We booked this for the afternoon of Day 7.

Kayak trip to Gilligan’s Island

This is a four-hour tour (of course, it would be more apropos if it were a 3-hour tour)…plus travel time to and from the north side of the island.  Officially, it is Coconut Island–but it is where some (all?)(at least the pilot) of Gilligan’s Island was shot.  If you are too young to remember the show….Boy did you miss one of the truly great quality high art television events.  A true tour de force with nuanced and carefully planned plot lines and characters (Ginger or Mary Ann? The Professor or ???)….you absolutely should find some reruns of it.

Anyway, we decided to book this on Day 8, our last full day in Hawaii, so if we are shipwrecked and can’t get off the island for three seasons, we won’t have missed any of our vacation.

(Total aside: I Googled fair use Gilligan’s Island images and this appeared.   No comment.) Perhaps more of a comment on Google’s search process rather than a political comment.