Maui Day 5 The Road to Hana

Like every day, I was up a little after 7:00. I spent an hour writing and at 8:00 woke Erin up. We knew there was construction on the Road to Hana and we had to get past mile marker 19 before 11:30. We packed all our food so we wouldn't have to buy lunch on the drive and headed out around 9:30. It's about a 45 minute drive from Lahaina to Kuhului where the road to Hana starts. I had found a neat web site that said to stop at the Shell gas station and pick up the Road to Hana CD companion. It came with a DVD and a map of the road, we were very glad we bought it. It would tell you when to turn it on and off based on where you were and what you had decided to see, we learned a lot from it. We found the station, which is fine as you need a full tank of gas anyways, and bought the CD. For everyone at home gas is $3.45 here in Hawaii. Traffic is so bad around here it took us another 45 minutes to get the CD, wait in line for gas, and get to the start of the road to Hana. We are now so far behind we tried to make time at the start. Honestly, it is impossible to fully describe the driving conditions on the Road to Hana. The 30 mile drive has over 600 hairpin turns, the majority of which cannot fit two cars side by side. It also boasts over 54 rickety bridges that you have to alternate they are so small, plus I doubt some of them could support two cars. You are on your own out there as tow trucks won't even venture through until after the torusists are no longer on the road. It's three hours of white knuckled on your toes driving. So basicly it was impossible to make up time and we knew we were not going to make it. The construction goes untill 11:30 so we slowed way down. The road to Hana has lots of little stops, paved pull offs just big enough for a car or two that you can jump out and take pictures. The first picture on this post is a shot of the first bay. If you look to the lower right, you can see a bit of the road, this was near the start of the journey so the roads were a little wider. Which was nice or I'm sure many people would turn around and go back. There are numerous things to see, waterfalls, pools, black and red beaches, several overlooks like my picture, and many areas that are quite literally a tropical jungle. If you have seen the movie Jurassic Park, it looks just like that. In fact since the movie was filmed in Hawaii, it makes sence. It was filled with unparalled beauty, like nothing we had ever seen. Well needless to say, even after stalling an hour and taking an hour to eat lunch, we were at the construction area by 2:30, an hour to wait. We were lucky enough to be next to a neat overlook of one of the little towns with hardly a population of 200. It was hard to believe people lived up here. We waited and hour and got going again by 3:45. I had decided you would have to be absolutly crazy to drive back in the dark so we knew we were turning around at 5:30. We made it to Hana around 5:15 and even though we didn't want to, we had to turn back. Some of the neatest things to see are past Hana but it takes another two hours to see them which would make the return time a four hour drive. The drive back was not as bad because unless your mind doesn't work at all, or you have one of the little hotels in Hana, you are not heading up the road to Hana at this time. We got back to Lahaina around 7:45 and stopped off at the Outback Steakhouse on the drive in. We know we have one at home but with Granite City in Cedar Rapids, we'll never go. It was good, we both ate cheap and had the bloomin' onion burger which was excellent. The newlyweds Matt and Lindsay Tully called and we are meeting up with them tomorrow. Thy are coming to spend the day in Lahaina and as we have become little experts on the town we are going to have lunch and show them around. Ululana and the long awaited Ruth's Chris tomorrow!

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