Maui Part 1

Last week we got home from our first childless vacation since having kids and had such a great time! In almost 10 years of marriage, we had only spent two separate childless nights apart together so we were sooo ready for it. Finances and later PTO and logistics kept us from getting away for far too long and I'm so glad we finally pulled it off! I flew with the kids to Utah on a Monday to drop them off at my parent's house, flew back to Arizona on a Wednesday, then flew with Spencer to Hawaii on a Thursday! (6 travel days for 6 vacation days... no wonder we don't do this very often!) These posts will have a lot of detail because I want to remember everything for when we go back again... cuz we've got to go back!!! I'm a go-go-go person on vacation and Spencer made it clear that he wanted plenty of time to do nothing and relax on the beach. Turns out kids are time suckers - we were surprised at how much we did and still had plenty of time to take naps, eat all the yummy food, and relax at the beach by our condo. Spencer even wanted to do the "optional" activities I had on our touring plan because it felt like we had so much extra time without having to take care of our cute but demanding kids! haha
First childless flight alone together since 2010!

We arrived in Maui at around 6:30 pm and were tired and starving. We stopped to eat at Da Kitchen before driving to our condo (I started out strong in the food pics department but then quickly realized that I'm a horrible food photographer ;). We ate at so many yummy recommended restaurants in Hawaii and ordered whatever Yelp told us to :) We got the fried spam musibi (a local fav we wanted to try) and kalbi ribs and loved them both!


We went to bed early (since it was 3 hours later Arizona time) all excited to sleep in since we didn't have kids with us but ended up waking up at 4:30 am the next morning ;) Our first day in Hawaii was supposed to be our grocery shopping and relax day but we were so excited to be there and not adjusted to the time change that it ended up being a marathon day! haha We went to a 24/7 Safeway to get a few groceries while it was still dark and left when it was still dark ;) When the sun finally came out, we were greeted by a cute little sea turtle swimming right outside our condo :) Then we went for a walk, stopped at the farmers market, started running and ended up running for five miles because we found the Kaanapali board walk and followed it to Black Rock! (Spencer said he got more cardio on this vacation than he has in the last few months! haha) Once we got back to our condo, we drove back to Black Rock to snorkel! The snorkeling didn't disappoint! We saw at least 5 sea turtles and two were just out in the waves swimming with the people at the beach. It was so much fun!
View from our condo :)


Morning run:

Black rock:

Sea turtles!!! (You may think this is a lot of sea turtle pictures but you have no idea how many I deleted :)








We grabbed lunch to go on the way home and ate lunch out on our patio. At this point it was ONLY 12:30!! Jet lag, man!

We relaxed, took naps and were ready after a few hours to go out to dinner. We went to Star Noodle that had one of my favorite foods to the vacation - their steamed pork buns were TO DIE FOR!!!!

They also gave us complimentary malasadas because service was slow but we didn't even notice the bad service because we weren't wrestling kids ;)

We explored and shopped in Lahaina afterwards before calling it a night after our fun first-day-in-Maui-marathon day :)