Leaving Maui

 Leaving Maui after 10 days was hard. IT is wonderful once you get used to the climate to wake up at 6 in the morning and go out in shorts on your veranda and watch the sunrise over the ocean and it's between 67 and 72 degrees even then. And even if it is raining it's okay because there is something above your head on your veranda (if you are lucky) so that you don't even get wet watching the sunrise maybe while it's lightly raining. The other thing you get used to is at the shorline on the islands there is usually a breeze of at least 5 to 12 miles per hour. So, you can literally watch the coconut palms sway in the breezes 24 hours a day there too. 

I was watching men trim some of the older palm fronds off of Coconut palms where I was staying this morning and one of the men suddenly rappelled like I used to when Rock climbing in places like Yosemite national Park in my 20s in the 1970s. I was amazed that he could climb one of the palms that was leaning quite far so he must have been quite light in weight to do this. The problem is that they don't want people to be hit by either coconuts or palm fronds because either could be potentially maiming or even fatal. There is a palm tree at our house in Santa Barbara for example, that scares our dog every time it drops palm fronds near her. So far, she hasn't been hit by one but it's location usually prevents people getting hit by falling palm fronds.

Anyway, we left Maui for the mainland and it was quite hard to leave because we had finally adjusted to the very humid warmer weather. It was mostly nice with temperatures not below 67 Fahrenheit at night and not usually above 83 degrees mostly during the day anywhere we went on the island. Even Haleakala was only 50 to 65 degrees when we are on the summit and crater of Haleakala which is around 10,000 feet elevation. All the islands were originally created by volcanoes. As the islands on the plate slowly drift northwards it's interesting to know that even Midway Island sprang from the same volcanic vent now on the Southern portion of the Big Island of Hawaii where Volcanoes National Park is.