Halfway to 46 and Back from Maui

It’s been awhile since I made a post, and I feel like making one would be a good use of my time today. I just got home from Maui, specifically the Lahaina/Napili area, and it was quite a shock to feel warm sun and see clear skies in the middle of December. I was definitely not used to that. I got to go with my family, which for the most part was good, and my girlfriend, which was awesome.

There’s definitely a specific type of air on the Hawaiian Islands that makes you feel very free, and it’s very difficult not to feel freedom forced onto you when you’re snorkeling right next to a Honu sea turtle. The picture that I’m including in this post isn’t some random National Geographic shot or something I grabbed off of the internet. My brother Matt took that in one of our snorkeling sessions not fifty feet from our resort. That’s how close we got, and they seemed perfectly alright with the intrusions of dumb, bumbling humans.

As we were there from the 15^th of this month until the 23^rd, the other thing that happened to me was that I spent my 23^rd birthday in Hawaii. We went out to dinner, I got to spend time in the ocean with Rachael, and enjoy the sun on the sand. That is a hell of a birthday present in and of itself.

Another fun part of our trip is one of the excursions Rachael and I took by ourselves (which we weren’t exactly supposed to do, but I don’t think many people care very much) to the ʻĪao Valley State Park about 40 miles from the resort, and got to see some pretty interesting sights like the ʻĪao “Needle,” as well as a stream that was the sight of a battle between Kalanikūpule and the Maui Army versus Kamehameha the Great in the latter’s attempt to unify the Hawaiian Islands. The stream that we saw was supposedly the sight of a massacre in which the water ran red and was dammed with the bodies of the combatants. Gruesome, but interesting. (HERE's a Wikipedia Article about the Battle)

All in all, it was a pretty good vacation and I enjoyed spending it with people I care about. Parts of it weren’t always fun, but in the end, who’ll bother remembering those parts anyways?

We’ll see how Christmas goes tomorrow and how the annual Eve dinner goes tonight with one very conspicuous absence. I’m not really looking forward to that very much, but being with family at this time of year is always of the highest priority. That is a tradition I never intend to break.