Road to Hana

I have never heard of the Road to Hana. I know...I know...who hasn't heard of the Road to Hana. Mitch talked about really wanting drive it, but that it was famous because it was a hard drive with 56 one way bridges and 617 curves. We decided that Wednesday was the perfect day to take this drive. We did have another lazy morning though, so we didn't take off until after 10am, and we had a few stops to make, including a surprise from Mitch.

We ended up at Wal-Mart first (because what's a trip to Maui without a stop in Wal-Mart!) We had to get some snacks for the road. Then, we went on to the rent a car place where we had gotten our car when we arrived, and that's where my surprise was waiting for me. Mitch had wanted to rent a White Jeep Wrangler with a black top for us to leave the wedding in, but you can't rent them here, so when we went to Hawaii, he rented one for me. They didn't have any white ones, but we got a silver one, and not only was it the sweetest present ever, but it was also TOTALLY fun to drive.
The thing about the Road to Hana is that the fun is not in the destination, but in the journey. It could take you as little as an hour and a half to get to Hana, but there are so many beautiful places to stop on the way. Because of all of the stops that we made (many not known by most tourists) it took us 6 hours to get to Hana.

Our first stop was to Twin Falls, and although we didn't go to those two falls, we took another turn and came to a spot where you could jump off the top of the waterfall, or swing from a vine through it. We did neither of those things, but it was fun to get to, (you had to walk through the water) and it was fun to watch.

Later on the trip, we found this beach that only 2 other cars knew about, so it was really fun. It was also good that we had the jeep because we had to go down this really steep, narrow road, and then drive in the sand. That was great. I WANT A JEEP!!!

We found a couple of places with lots of black lava rocks, and Mitch climbed through them at one of the stops. These were 2 other little known places, so we only saw one or two other people at each place. (Twin Falls had a hundred or two, and many of the scenic stops had 10-20 people.) On one of these scenic stops, we saw rainbow trees. I'm serious! They were rainbow colors!

By the time we got to Hana, it was getting dark, and we were tired. We had hoped to make it a few more miles past to the Seven Sacred Pools. We'll have to take another trip someday. Instead, Mitch tried to sleep through the drive down because he was beginning to get motion sick, and I had a blast driving the Jeep down. Right outside of town though, there was a woman selling many different varieties of banana bread, and we stopped and bought 3 small loaves. We spent the rest of the week eating those for breakfast.

Here are the rainbow trees.____________________________________________________________________

Earlier in the week, we weren't feeling to great about the room that we had ended up in. As I stated in an earlier post, we were ground level with a parking lot view, and the sounds of the loading dock, so before we took off this morning, we got all of our bags ready for the hotel to move to our new room. We ended up on the top floor with a beautiful ocean view. The cost of the room was much more, but it was really worth it. We just gave up an hour long helicopter ride for 4 days of beauty.
Here are some pictures of our ocean view.