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| Tall coconut palms often depict the tropical nature of islands throughout the world. |
Last night I dreamed of whales breaching the water and being able to take perfect photos of the experience. Today may prove to have been “in my dreams only” or, if we’re lucky, an exquisite reality. We shall see.
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| A fine view from our lanai of another perfect day in paradise. |
In only a few hours, three as I write here now, we’ll make our way around the corner to the Maui Ocean Center, a mall with a handful of shops, none of which we ever visited in our six weeks here in Maalaea Beach.
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| Another magnificent view of the shoreline in Maui. |
Having walked to the mall a few times, I’m familiar with the location where we’ll go to prepare to board the boat from the Pacific Whale Foundation for the excursion. We attempted to arrange an outing on a smaller boat, with the holiday weekend, it wasn’t possible, although we were willing to pay a premium to do so.
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| We stopped in a local shop that used local essential oils in making soaps, balms, and bath products. With no room in our luggage, I walked out empty handed. |
After all, we’re under budget for the stay in Maui by no less than $1500, mainly due to the estimated costs for dining out and grocery shopping. After a few feeble attempts at getting satisfactory meals in restaurants befitting my way of eating, we gave up, deciding cooking our own meals would be our best option during this short period in Maui.
Now, as we’ve used most of our food supplies and, after we mailed the big box to the Big Island yesterday for a meager cost of $18.55, arriving today to be left at the door for us, we’re down to bare bones in the way of food.
With lots of eggs, bacon, cheese, onion, and ingredients to make omelets, bacon, and coconut flour pancakes, we’ll happily have “breakfast” for dinner these next two nights until we depart on Monday morning for the short flight to Hawai’i, aka the Big Island.
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| A couple of times each week I walked across the lawn of the neighboring condo building to the local grocer, Tradewinds. |
It’s confusing to call the Big Island, “Hawai’i” when all of the islands collectively are referred to as Hawaii. In the Hawaiian language with the excessive use of vowels and apostrophes, Hawai’i is spelled as indicated and is pronounced as “ha, vie, ee” as we often hear when speaking to residents and locals.
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| The owners of this small grocery store we friendly and helpful, ordering special items for me on several occasions. Their prices were comparable to most of the prices at the supermarket in Kihei. |
This morning after posting here, we’ll go to the pool for our usual one-hour dose of Vitamin D to return indoors to get our shirts, shoes, two cameras, hats, sunglasses, and binoculars and, my phone with a copy of the tickets.
The printer here in the condo wouldn’t work leaving us unable to print boarding passes, car rental confirmation, etc. instead, using digital copies as an alternative.
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| Each day, the owners visited a local farm to pick up fresh produce. |
Finally, many business entities are accepting digital copies of documents as opposed to the wasteful and cumbersome nature of using paper, especially for travelers with no access to a printer, such as us, since our printer died months ago.
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| Their shelves were lined with many popular food items. The store is always busy. |
Today, we’re sharing an array of Maui photos we’d yet to share and tomorrow, we’ll be back with photos from our whale watching experience.
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Recently, on Facebook, we’d seen photos of this car, a 1959 Cadillac convertible (woody) hanging from the ceiling at Hard Rock Café in Lahaina. On our return drive from Kaanapali Beach, we stopped to take a few photos of our own as shown.
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We hope all of our readers enjoy the remainder of their weekend doing exactly what they find most rewarding and meaningful. Isn’t that what “it’s” all about after all?
Photo from one year ago, November 29, 2013:
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| As we prepared to leave Kenya, we posted a few of our favorite photos in the last few days. This lion was rested under this tree while mating. The female was across from him resting under another tree. We had the glorious opportunity to witness the mating process from less than 30 feet away. For details of this date, please click here. |