When you go on a cruise, they have occasional downtime that’s listed on the trip itinerary as “Fun Day at Sea”. That’s marketing-speak for “Boring Day as We Go to the Next Port”.
Today was our equivalent of a Fun Day at Sea… we didn’t really do much that was exciting. In the morning we did laundry (because who has nine changes of underwear?) and re-packed all of our things so we could check out of the hotel.
We had a few hours to kill before heading to the airport for our island-hop to Maui, so we decided to have lunch at Benihana. As always, it was amazing, and remains in my list of top ten best restaurants. Oddly enough, this was the third time we’d been to Benihana with Kurt and Megan, and in three different cities (Honolulu, San Diego, and Superior).
Afterward we went to the beach where we’d seen some kind of surf competition earlier in the morning. It was called something like “Duke’s Surf Competition”, and as everyone on the island knows, many things are named for Duke Kahanamoku, who was a surfing legend back in the early half of the 20th Century. Unfortunately, when we arrived the competition was over and the waves were down, so most of the surfers looked like this:
I guess surfing can require a lot of patience, because we watched for maybe ten minutes and no waves appeared, but these guys just floated out there waiting for the big one. There was one guy paddle-boarding with his dog, which I thought was fun:
After a while we wandered along the beach and found an amazing banyan tree. This thing was massive, and had a huge network of “trunks”.
Eventually we headed to the airport and took a 40-minute flight to Maui. The sun sets surprisingly early here (around 6:30) so when we landed it was dark. We were looking for dinner and stumbled across a place called Monkeypod, which from afar looked like Monkeypoo. It was pretty happenin’, with live music and a huge crowd, but the wait was 45 minutes and we were pretty hungry. Across the parking lot was a little place called Fabiani’s, which sounded Italian, so we headed over there. It was indeed Italian, and we ended up having a really good dinner– we all agreed it was probably better (and certainly quieter) than Monkeypoo. Hah!
I’m excited for our next four days in Maui, because we’ll be doing more snorkeling as well as some hiking. The weather forecast is almost comical in its consistency:
The temperature swings about 10 degrees every day, and the wind is always southwest and varying between 10 and 20mph. I guess you know what to expect if you live around here!