Maui Day 3: Haleakula

We woke up about 2:15 am (I hit the snooze button on the alarm set at 2am) and we packed up everything in the Maui Lu hotel room, checking out of our room about 3am. We were about to begin the longest day of our lives.

We began to drive up to Haleakula National Park to see the famous sunrise. We heard it was spectacular and that it would be really really cold there. It took us about 2 hours from Kihea to get there. When we got there, it was very dark with a sliver of light coming up. And my god it was cold... cold... COLD! And windy. We rushed up to the observation tower to get out of the cold wind. We met Tom up there and his new brother and law Ryan. Ryan didn't seem to be quite prepared for the cold. When he arrived he was the only one wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.

As for the sunset, it was quite beautiful. It wasn't an amazing sunset like the one we saw at Bryce Canyon, but it was still quite amazing. What made it amazing was not the sunset itself, but the scenery around it. We were over 10,000 feet above sea level, high above clouds, overlooking the island. The clouds at first seems to look like distant mountains, but once the sunlight revealed that they were not mountains and that they were clouds, made our mouths say "wow!". Once the sun came up, we trekked around a little bit with Tom and Ryan to look over the edge of the mountain overlooking the valley. It was quite breathtaking.

We said our goodbyes to Tom and Ryan, and headed back down the mountain. We followed many bikers down the road which seem to be an attraction that looked pretty fun. Zenia passed out asleep down the mountain and I seemed to get a little sleepy as well while driving. Zenia tried to keep me awake, but she could barely stay awake, resulting in her talking in her sleep. "Why did she drop that towel?" and blurting out "WHAT!?" in her sleep. Good stuff.

We finally reached the valley after about an hour and a half down into "airport town", Kahului. Grabbing some breakfast at Denny's and buying some swimsuits and snorkeling gear, we decided to hit the northwestern part of the island.