Maui explained...

I realize that last post may have come as a surprise...I forgot to even say that I was coming to Maui! My life has been so hectic lately, I forgot what I had said on the blog and what I hadn't. In light of recent events in my life, I decided a trip to visit Maui would be a great way to clear my head and relax. I have mentioned before that my dad Steve and his wife Deedee live here. Now that I am self employed, I can really work almost anywhere...as long as I don't have meetings scheduled. So I cleared my calendar for the week and here I am! I am getting up at 4:30 Maui time, 7:30 California time. I work for 6 or 7 hours, exercise, and by noon I can head to the beach. It's perfect! Of course, I am passing out at about 8:30, but that's fine. I also find it really peaceful to get up so early here...the house is quiet, I can watch the sunrise, and focus my energy and thoughts for the day.

Yesterday I tried to run after the trip to the tomato farm at around noon, and it was AWFUL! It was so humid, I thought I was going to pass out.

Today's workout was scheduled as yoga, so I did a Dave Farmer Free Vinyasa yoga podcast...they are intense! and free on Itunes...FYI. I had the curtains open in my room over looking the Pacific Ocean. It was pitch black when I started, but 80 minutes later, the sun started to come up, my legs and arms felt stretched and strong, and I worked up a good sweat from exercise rather than from the humidity. Now I am getting some work done and am heading to the beach later. I hope to get another swim in...the beach I am going to today is much more calm on the wave front than the beach I was at yesterday, so swimming shouldn't be quite as labored as it was yesterday.

This is an old picture, but this is the beach I was at yesterday...Napili. The waves yesterday were about double this height..I am guessing 8-10 feet. I was getting tossed around everywhere...sometimes I was swimming with all my might but wasn't moving anywhere. What a great work out swimming in the ocean is.

Happy Friday. I hope you all enjoy yourselves this weekend!

Maui....

I decided to come to Maui for a few days to relax. It's also a great place to work as I have no distractions here. 

Last night my flight was late, but my step mom Deedee made me this fantastic vegetarian dinner after a trip to the new Whole Foods here. We had a huge and tasty salad and a big homemade veg pizza. It was so hard not to eat more of the pizza. It was seriously tasty...homemade pesto, squash, mushrooms, spinach...man...and sourdough crust...YUM!

Today I worked for about 6 hours, and then we went to a local farm and got some delectable tomatoes and lettuce....

 This is one of the green houses where the protect the fruit from Hawaiian bugs....

 Everything is grown hydroponicly here. Here is lettuce, basil and cucumbers...

 Baby lettuce...

 Cucumbers...the farmer just planted these about two weeks ago! They were nearly 5 feet tall. Unreal.

 This is cinnamon basil. I tasted it...it was great, but did not taste like cinnamon.

 Then I went for a run, spent time at the beach, and swam about 750 yards in the ocean! It was tiring...so I came home for a well deserved mai tai. Deedee is the bartender. 

 Mmm...mai tais....

At this point today, I have exercised twice, worked for about 7 hours, and had a hard day of relaxing at the beach. Dinner tonight is roasted tofu (my doing) and a big salad. Aloha!

Hana Treehouse!

So as I mentioned, Aaron and I just went to visit my dad in Maui. We had  a great time...especially when we went to Hana and stayed in a TREEHOUSE! To be honest, it was an adventure...TONS of mosquitoes, lots of spiders, toilet outside in the jungle, insanely large avocados were pummeling the roof all night. Needless to say, I did not get much sleep. But we could see the ocean from where we were and the drive to Hana was gorgeous.

Here we are at the beach:

 Here we are having mai tais! Yum!

 Here we are in the bottom of an extremely scary lava tube. I felt like Indiana Jones!

 Here is the inside of the treehouse!

 These flowers grew all around the treehouse wild. It was literally in the middle of the jungle. We had to drive through mud to get to it, and then we had to hike through lots more mud to get up to the treehouse. There were no people around...except menehunes!!!

 These are the towels for the shower that was outside. Not a good idea with the amount of mosquitoes everywhere! Seriously, we got eaten.

 Here is the firemaster bringing us light...since there was no electricity!

 The man that owns this property has built treehouses all over the world. He wrote a book about it and Aaron was taking a look.

 See all those citronella candles in the background? They didn't really work that well. There were all kinds of dead bugs inside the candles in the morning.

 In the background is the ocean. It's about 1.5 miles away. It was raining like crazy.

 This is where we ate our dinner which was purchased at Mana Foods which was the coolest store in a cute little town called Paia. In the background you can see the "bathroom".

 This is the side of the treehouse. Right below we found 5 pound avocados which were knocked off in the middle of the night. They could have killed us! There were tons of guavas and other things that the storm had knocked off branches. It was wild.

 The treehouse was three stories with the bedroom in the middle. The top floor was really cool with great view but it had a grass roof which was ineffective against all that rain, so we stayed on the middle floor most of the time.

 The sun came out in the morning and it was so pretty.

 We had dinner at Lahaina Grill one night and the famous Amanda made an appearance! We had a blast catching up since we hadn't seen each other since high school.

Here are me and my dad. 

All in all...a great trip to Maui. Lots of relaxing, healthy foods, lots of exercise. It was the first vacation in a while where I actually lost a few pounds! Aaron and I were so active the whole time. My dad and I also took lots of long walks, which was lovely! I must warn you, if you decide to do the treehouse, bring lots of bug spray! It was not for the faint of heart.