Aloha!

This the first of probably several from my trip to Hawaii. I now have ready access to a computer so I will be posting as I go most likely. Kim and I flew into Maui last Tuesday and will be here until late Thursday night.

Megan picked us up at the airport. On the way back to her house, we made our first scenic stop at Baldwin Beach. That's the beach I went to most when we were living on Maui.

Megan was so nice and made us plumeria leis to welcome us. They're my favorite flower and I don't think there's a better smell in the world!

This is a shot from Baldwin Beach out to the parking lot and the Hana Hwy just beyond.

Megan took us to this scenic outlook near her house. The view was awesome. This picture is my best attempt at capturing it, although it doesn't do it justice.

Teija, one of Megan's nieces took us on a tour of the Akinaka yard. Their house is just behind kim and Teija.

This is one of many poses she did for us. She had a lot of fun on the mini photo shoot.

Here are some bananas in Megan's yard! Sort of unrelated, they had some apple bananas at their house which were SO GOOD! I need to find some more of those.

I had to post one of the plumeria shots I took. I was playing around with a new lens on my camera.

Here's Megan with a couple of her other neices, Kailea and Maila (I'm not sure if I spelled those right).

Megan got one of me with two of my favs: plumeria and palm trees!

The next day we headed to one of my favorite Maui locations - the Iao Valley. This is a picture of the Iao Needle. The weather was perfect as was the lighting.

Here are the 3 of us posing by the Needle.

We saw some guavas so Megan got up the hill to bend the branch down for Kim to pick it.

Megan got out in the river on some rocks to get this shot of the Needle. There are a lot more of these, but I won't post them all!

We loved this little hut facing the other direction in the Valley.

I had never seen a blossom on a banana tree. It looked pretty cool.

Okay, one more. I loved it from this angle too!

Here's Kim foraging out into the wilderness. It really reminded us of Jurassic Park - right state, wrong island.

Just down from the Iao Valley is a cool garden/park with different cultures represented. This was in the Japanese part of the garden.

Megan posed beside her Japanese friends.

They had a really cool bamboo trail behind the Japanese portion.

This was in the Filipino section.

In that section they had this pond FULL of lily pads. Someone had pulled some of them out and just thrown them around. Megan restored everything back into it's proper place.

This is another of my favorite shots right by the Filipino part.

Kim found this cool reflection shot right by there as well.

Still at the Filipino location. I couldn't stop taking pictures - it was so pretty!

I liked these dark pink plumeria as well. They don't smell quite as good as the white ones, but I still really like them!