Maui-Wowey!

So a few months ago my mom gets the idea that she'd like to spend a whole bunch of money to take the family to Hawaii, specifically, Maui.

The above shots are from outside the cottage(s) where we stayed.  I use the plural because there were 16 of us involved on this sojourn to Maui.  We were in a rain forest, pretty much with much dense jungle foliage everywhere.  Truly a different kind of place.

This was, what looked like a large group of trees, but was really just one,  some sort of banyan, I believe.

A rainbow bark eucalyptus, I saw a whole forest of these with bamboo all around. 

I found the plant life and trees to be flat out, amazing. So many colors, shapes, & sizes.  Like this tree has this smallish trunk but fans out so far, truly a marvel! On the other side of the road was some Maui pineapple fields, which I really should have taken some good pictures of. 

So one day we went to a beach.  It must be some sort of law because every beach we went to was nice!

Turtles were everywhere! Here's one swimming underneath me, they gave no notice of me at all, they're probably used to seeing humans.  Thank god they are not mean or harmful, 'cause there heads and mouths were big enough to take a softball size part of me with no problem. I was in their element! They were so graceful. 

They got real close, I was back paddling away to avoid being run into. 

It was great to watch them just kind of hang in the water and glide and flap their fins slowly. 

It's amazing how big their fins are!

Here's one laying on the bottom, I saw him go up for air then just slowly sink down. 

This is the one coming right at me, you can see how close he got in a picture above.

It was crazy, they were all around me, like a big herd of them all going in various directions. 

Before I left on the trip I bought a refurbished Fuji, underwater camera on e-bay that performed well.  At this particular beach you were swimming in a midst of turtles and they were huge!  I wish I would have been smart enough to use the movie function!

The three pics above are from a valley we hiked up that was near the airport, another beautiful place. 

Above is the plane(a Cessna, I think) we took from Maui to the big island.  It held 10 people and our luggage. It was a great flight and gave a nice view of Maui as we headed across the ocean to the big island. The pic immediately above is the pilot getting out of the plane, a lady pilot, she had a flower in her hair, bracelets, and looked professional and beautiful, all at once!  it was a smooth flight and she did a great job getting us to the big island.  I really enjoyed the flight.