Here are some random pictures of the view from the side of the volcano as we continued on our little adventure…
We were on our way to visit some lavender fields…
The lavender fields were on a very nice farm, and there were hundreds of tropical flowers there as well, but I already showed you all the flower pictures…
So I guess what we are left with are these pictures of views…
That one is a little dark, but you can just make out the beds of the little, purple lavender flowers…
We drove back down the volcano, and then started driving along its flank. The views were quite nice…
We ended up in some very green farm country. In fact, Oprah Winfrey own a huge piece of land right here, and it pisses the locals off…
Oh, and on the way down the volcano, we spotted the rare owl that lives on the mountain and flies during the day. If I had a better camera, you might be able to actually see that it is an owl…
Then we arrived at the cute little winery…
I guess I already showed you that picture of my wife and her sister knocking back some vino inside this building, and I showed you the flowers growing on the grounds when I did all those flower pictures. But they did have an interesting wooden sculpture garden…
And then, across the street, I spotted something white in a tree…
Yes… there it is… the rare and illusive albino tree-climbing volcano winery goat!!!
Oh yeah… that’s me… standing on top of a volcano… with the crater behind me. This is just one of the things we did with Kirk and Laural on that crazy day. Here they are, bundled up against the cold. Because that is how tall the volcano was…
We were above the clouds, and when we first walked to the edge of the crater, you couldn’t see more than twenty or thirty feet. All of a sudden, the clouds opened up…
And they opened up a little more…
By the time I took that first picture of myself, the sun was shining on us. There is also an observatory and a secret government base that is covered with antennas on top of the volcano…
All in all, it was a surreal place to be. We also saw a bunch of those silver sword plants I showed you in an earlier post. They only grow in this one spot. Yes, I could have shown you all of the pictures of our second honeymoon in order and not done all the flowers together and mixed things up so much, but if you want to see normal, what are you doing here on my blog?
Parts of the landscape reminded me of Mars… not that I am admitting I have visited Mars…
There were too many clouds below us to get a good view of the ocean…
It sort of felt like we had left Maui and ended up on a smaller, colder island in a sea of clouds. But they did have this nice map up there…
Okay, that’s enough for today. I will finish this series of posts about the big day tomorrow. We both deserve a break.
Sorry, I couldn’t wait until tomorrow. I have to start now. Because after that huge breakfast and the walk on the beach in the last post, we drove up a freakin’ volcano…
That is what the volcano looks like, looming in the distance. Driving to the top, you pass through all sorts of changing vegetation… like this pine forest…
And then this short scrub brush…
We went higher…
And higher…
You can see the ocean peeking out from under the clouds… When we got to the top, we were pretty high in the air…
Parts of it look like you are walking on the moon…
We were inside the clouds… we were above the clouds…
It was really a rather strange place…
Yes, I know… I am getting carried away with doing too many posts in one day about our second honeymoon on Maui… but I am only doing this many posts when I am not writing funny stories between each picture… so we can get through these…
We were taking a drive one day and saw all of these guys at a little ranch beside the road…
We didn’t know there was so many goats until we walked over to the fence and this goat stampede started towards us in a cloud of dust…
I like goats… I have more pictures of goats coming up later…
Goats are cool… but then we spotted one of Maui’s famous wild pigs. I know, you can barely see it way over there under that palm tree…
Maui was also covered with ducks…
And I saw these baby doves…
And more baby chickens…
And even more baby chickens…
Let me zoom in so you can see the proud mom and dad…
The roosters on Maui are quite busy…
I spotted these three hens talking about that guy…
I saw this elephant… well, actually there were two of them, so… these elephants… when we went to visit the lavender fields and I took many of the pictures of flowers that I already shared with you…
I know, it is weird to take a picture of a banana that you are about to eat… but I bought this banana in a little store on Maui… and it was a banana grown in Hawaii… and it was the most bananay banana I ever ate…
And now, some beaches…
Just beaches we saw on our second honeymoon… in Maui…
Because beaches are always fun…
And Maui is an island… so it has lots of beaches…
And I saw this little train engine…
And here is one more picture of the car we rented… sort of…
I like the way the colors of the leaves go with the color of the car…
And, one last picture of the beach at our hotel… not the last picture, just the last one in this post… HA!
And other random images of Maui…
Because… you know…
Why not?
What about these footprints of some birds on a beach…
Or these strange statues guarding a gate that we found while driving aimlessly through the hills…
Because they were awesome…
Or how about these little plants growing on a wall made of black lava rock?
Or these bubbles that were frozen in time when this piece of lava cooled…
Or some weird stuff on the roof of a place we ordered some take out food…
There was this house across the street from our hotel…
They had a high school reunion that lasted for days. One night, the Hawaiian guy who lived here stayed up all night drinking and chanting… well… it was a cross between chanting and a primal scream… and he had chickens in his yard…
I got some pictures of the mama chicken and her babies… there was also a mongoose, but he was too fast for me to get his picture…
There were a lot of birds on Maui besides the red-headed cardinals that I already showed you…
There were also lots of Mynah birds… They never did play shuffleboard, and neither did we…
And these friendly little fellows…
I still don’t know how many of these species are native and which were introduced by people. When we took our morning walks, we would see these holes in the sand. I got curious and stood on the beach one morning without moving for a while, and finally saw what lived in the holes…
Wait, I can do better than that…
There you go. We also saw these huge snails…
I should have stuck something in the picture to give it some scale…
Because these were the largest snails I have ever seen.
Oh, silly crack squirrels… you always get up early… and so do I…
Hey… who do you think you are fooling? That isn’t a picture of a sunrise at all… that is a picture of a sunset… but I appreciate that you wanted to get rid of another one of the countless selfies I took…
So, we didn’t do a lot that first night in our fancy new ’boutique hotel’ on Maui. Because we had already traveled on a crazy road through the jungle and hiked up a big old volcano to see a waterfall and had all those other adventures I just shared with you. I did grab my face mask and snorkel and go for a quick swim on the reef… after having food and a few drinks at our new favorite bar. Just for the record, I do not recommend drinking and snorkeling… especially on a reef in Maui… it is dangerous and stupid… but I am a very strong swimmer.
We did get up very early the next morning and take a romantic sunrise walk on the beach…
We were still on California time in our heads, so getting up at four in the morning wasn’t a problem…
But I always try to do that when I am traveling. You get to see things while everybody else is still asleep…
We walked over to the next spit of land jutting out into the sea…
And we had it all to ourselves for quite a while. I explored some tide pools…
Once again, my goofy all-terrain shoes came in handy on the sharp and slippery coral and lava rocks…
Eventually, other people started to filter out and intrude on our seclusion…
But, once again, the best thing about traveling when it isn’t the height of tourist season is that the crowds never get too bad…
And they tend to be made up of retired people and young married couples without children or with kids too young to be in school…
Just remember, there is no joy in life like being someplace new and going to the next turn in the road, or the next point of land, or the next crest of a hill… because it is in the unexplored vistas that adventure is found…
In an earlier post, I mentioned that we had rooms at the hotel on Maui where we stayed for part of our second honeymoon. I don’t mean that we had a luxury apartment with multiple rooms… I meant that we actually moved four times. Let me explain.
We did not originally start off with this view…
We started off in a room on the lower of the two floors. This was very convenient in some ways. We were only about 50 feet from the beach…
And it was a lovely room. But we didn’t really have a very good view of the ocean, and there wasn’t as much privacy as there could have been. There was no air conditioning, so you wanted to let the breezes in, but on the ground floor, with people walking by, this was a problem at bed time…
So the next morning, we asked if there was a vacancy on the second floor. And there was… for two nights. Then, another room on the upper floor, just two doors away from the one we were moving to, would be open for a few days…
So we moved into one room, then another room, and then another room… and then back to our first room on the ground floor for the last night…
And they all looked more or less the same…
And it wasn’t like we had to move far, or had too much stuff to move…
Does that all make sense? But the upstairs rooms did have the nice views…
And of course, I met all those lizards and took a lot of those flower pictures at this lovely hotel. And it really was an awesome place to stay. We felt very at home, and the people were lovely. But mostly, it was the views… and the beach… and the privacy…
Although, even on the second floor, you would get the occasional unexpected visitors…
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Pouring My Art Out by Arthur H. Browne is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Based on a work at https://pouringmyartout.wordpress.com/.
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