aloha

Well, it seems that October has come and gone and once again, i sit a month later to put it all in words...
The first week of Oct. was our first anniversary. Not because we think one year is a huge feat ( i recently met a couple in the er who were married for 65 years) but because we live so much closer to it and the flights are cheaper, Tony and i decided to spend out 1 year in hawaii. Maui to be exact.
Our flight left right after work so the train trip to the airport was exhausting and we both slept the entire flight. Luckily 'maui time' is another 3 hours behind, so we left at 9ish in the morning and got there by noonish .
we checked into our hotel, which was really a condo, and made ourselves comfortable.
The first night we took it easy since we were a bit sleep deprived. We did walk around town and check out the beach.
Our second day on the island we drove to hana. I only knew about this because a friend of ours told us about taking the ' road to hana.' Hana itself isn't really an exciting town, but the drive there is astounding. It is something around 50 miles to get there from where we were, but it took well over 4 hours to get there. The road is pretty rustic. Most of it is narrow lanes and some Indiana jones-esque one lane bridges. We also stopped oftne along the way because the road to hana is mostly about the road and less about hana.
We stopped at a few waterfalls, and arb and anytime we saw a view that was breathtaking.
Once we got to hana, we put our feet in the water, took some photos and then headed right back home. Which took much less time because we didn't need to stop off and hike anywhere, since we did it on the way there.
on saturday, we explored the rest of the island including some little beach towns and one beach that would soon have humback and grey whales migrating to it- unfortunately we were a month too early.
Sunday was our anniversary and we celebrated it by getting up at the crack of dawn so we could get on a boat and go snorkeling with sea turtles and other marine life.
It was incredible... We got to snorkel at two different sites. At the first one, we saw a shark, some eels and random tropical fish. The second site was the coolest, we were swimming with giant sea turtles. We saw two or three of them while we were in the water, and then on the way back to shore we watched as a few of them resurfaced for air.
As if that wasn't enough celebrating, that night we went to a luau. It was really fascinating. There was a lot of Hawaii history told by dance and music and then, of course, a lot of food.
Monday we decided to take it easy and visit a winery, where we purchased enough wine to last us for the next year, well maybe not that much, but a lot of pineapple wine. Then we watched the sunset on the beach and got ready to say aloha to hawaii.

But as soon as we said goodbye to hawaii, we got to say hello to my mommy who came to visit us right when we got home!!! see next post for highlights from her visit: )