Maui 2017 Day 1: Jet lag? What's that? (a.k.a. Late night Sushi & Karaoke)
...and off we go!
Michal had pointed out to me that this was the 5th year IN A ROW that I was getting whisked off, traveling to some epic place to celebrate my birthday on a trip somewhere: Buenos Aires (30th), Sonoma (31st), Scotland (32nd), Israel (33rd), Bermuda (34th), and now Maui (35th). I was called 'spoilt' and that seems a fair word to use. Perhaps 'absurdly fortunate' is another?! So it was with a grateful and adventurous heart that we took off (yet again!) to go celebrate my b-day in an absurdly epic way.
As I mentioned in the previous post: I've never been to Hawaii. That's not so odd, being that I am from London, Ontario, Canada -- those of us in the EST time zone don't as often make the 5hr flight schlep to SFO or Vancouver and then take another 5-6hr flight to Hawaii when Paris or London or another amazing place in Europe is a mere 6-8hrs away on a direct flight. That said, I've been in San Francisco for 12 years and it's a very quick, easy, and affordable trip from here with plenty of flight deals to be found.
We took Virgin America, which is always a fun airline. We were in two side-by-side aisle seats (full flight) so we took advantage of the fun/silly seat-to-seat chat app on the seat-back entertainment system. I also "sent" Michal a snack!! That was fun, and presumably in the same realm as the "seat-to-seat" chat and the ability to send a random person on the flight an alcoholic beverage. I like how Virgin America kinda went for the "this is a hip bar in the sky" thing, and also assumed that millennials couldn't possibly not text anyone for an entire duration of a flight.
We arrived in Maui and got to the rental car place swiftly. I was pretty nervous about our choice as we left the rental car booking too late so prices had gone up too much at the regular spots. We booked with Hotwire's Hot Rate which meant we got stuck with whatever we got -- which was something called Advantage Rent-A-Car -- and had a glorious 1.5* on Yelp. Whoops. The reviews were pretty shockingly bad so I was worried it was gonna suuuuck. Turns out it was absolutely fine. They tried to sucker us into paying for extra car insurance, but otherwise it was great, the car was in excellent condition, clean, and we arrived so late that I think we got a free upgrade to a Volkswagen Passat Wolfsburg Edition. Fancy leather seats, a lot of kick under-the-hood, and super clean and in great shape. Couldn't have been happier with how this all worked out. It also only took about 30 min in and out of the rental place, which was a breeze compared to what Yelp made it sound like it was gonna be. So... win.
Took off for the 30 min drive to the Fairmont Kea Lani, dropped our stuff, changed, and marveled at the amazing room and the view of the pool (and what the view of the ocean would be in the morning!) We were also treated to some suuuuper special welcome/birthday treats amazingly waiting for us there on arrival. Totally nuts and an amazing welcome. The place was huge!!
We dropped our stuff and then headed back out to the coastal town of Kihei, about 10-12 min north and a place that looked pretty awesome and I figured we'd be back to a few times. We headed to Sansei Sushi, a super well-recommended sushi place that people love and many locals told us we should go to. There was some loud and raucous karaoke going on (fabulous) and a total epic vibe watching the locals belt out Katy Perry and Simon and Garfunkel. Amazing. Also: GREAT sushi! And half-price late night, which was all according to our plan :) Huzzah!
And here comes the sushi...
Here's a bit of the Karaoke madness:
An epic start to the trip, we hadn't even been in Hawaii for 2 hours and we'd already experienced an awesome and ridiculously fun start to the trip, and crushhhed some epic sushi. Mahalo!! Let's DO THIS.
No comments:
Post a Comment