Hey Steve, you may be saying, where you been? We haven't seen you around lately.

No?

Well, I'll tell you.

I've been to Hawaii.

Yes!

Lucie and I just returned from a week long stay in Maui. We went with a large group of good friends and shared a rental house just two minutes, by foot, from the beach. We got our tickets and reserved the house starting back in March or April. Back then, it looked like COVID was on the wane. The house was plenty expensive, even split ten ways, and the airline tickets were expensive too. But, we'd gone nowhere for all of 2020 so, spread over two years, the cost was more palatable.

Then, with the delta variant, we all spent months waiting for the trip to fall apart. I will say, Hawaii takes COVID much more seriously than Arizona, which was nice. Everyone wears masks indoors (except to eat.) Most of the shops had customer occupancy limits too. Everyone in our group is vaccinated so we didn't have to quarantine upon entry or test before entry. Many of us got tested anyhow, just to be safe.

Okay, yay, Hawaii! Cool, Steve, but what's with the Old Guy reference in the title?

Oh, well . . . that's me.

It occurred to me, the front page photos of me on this blog are all out of date. I've grown a beard and it's white. I've grown out my hair and it's long...and white. So, you'll see. There's photos.

Anyhow. We had a terrific time. I'm not generally big on Hawaiian shirts or tiki culture, but, in Hawaii it goes down nicely. Also, I've never had so many mai tais in my life. They're delicious.

So, what all did we do? Well, in no particular order:

  • We snorkeled a lot and looked for turtles (or I tried to; my mask leaked around my mustache. Lucie got up and close with one big old turtle.)
  • Lucie and I took surf lessons. We both managed to catch a couple waves.
  • Lucie and I also went on a sunset dinner cruise.
  • The guys all went on a deep sea fishing trip and caught zero fish (we saw about a hundred dolphins at one point, though!)
  • We all bobbed in the ocean. The water is clean and blue and warm.
  • We went to a Luau.
  • We ate dinner at a wonderful restaurant called Mamas Fish House - it's much fancier than the name sounds and there wasn't a bad dish on the menu.
  • We checked out Paia and Kihai (our house was in Lahaina.)
  • We tried to go bar hopping but there were limited choices for a group our size.
  • We shopped and wandered.
  • We ate big communal meals at the house.
  • We took a full moon stroll along the beach.
  • We did things which I'm sure I've forgotten already but it was all very nice and very relaxing.

I know, words, words, words. Time for some pictures. I'll just post of few. I've got tons of ocean photos and palm tree photos and bird photos and boat photos. Most of the photos look alike.

Here we go:

The path from our house to the beach.
Lucie at Baby Beach, two minutes from the house.
A real life salty dog...
Roosters everywhere...
Hibiscus everywhere...

Me in my hat...
Lucie on the sunset cruise...
Me at Cheeseburger in Paradise after our surf lessons. Best mai tai of the trip!
After our Luau. We forgot the masks before the selfie!
Aloha!