The Southside

As Ravi is so kindly making me a delicious fruit smoothie right now, I figured that I could do the blog post once again. We started our Sunday out at a Jazz Breakfast at a nearby hotel. It wasn't quite as cheap as I remember my family's traditional Outrigger Reef Hotel brunches being, but it was just as delicious. They had lots of good hot and greasy food, but the best part was the fresh Hawaiian fruit and the waffles with fresh coconut, macademia nuts and coconut syrup. Ravi also quite enjoyed the birds (for some reason, he's been pretty obsessed with the birds here--they are unusual, since many of them don't seem to be able to fly. Or maybe they just like the power they have over us when we have to stop our car for them to slowly walk across the road.) As Nicole and perhaps others of you may have guessed, I was not such a huge fan of the birds, but I did enjoy the "jazz" music, which was really just songs with that Hawaiian sound.

We decided to "do" South Maui today, so we drove around to the other half of the island and did a beach tour. We went to one of the highest rated beaches in America, called Wailea Beach, but it wasn't all that high on my list. My criteria for a great beach are nice sand, a beautiful view, not too crowded, shady spots and good snorkeling and/or boogie boarding waves. This beach really only had one of these things (the nice sand), so I was pretty whiney. Ravi threatened father-like to make us leave right then and there, but I refused to get up, so we stayed and ate some Maui-style potato chips instead. We did go on later to Big Beach, where we got a nice nap in, and then to a cool black sand beach, which you can see above.

On the way back to our condo, we tried to stop and get a famous ice cream cookie sandwich at Hula Cookies, but alas, it had closed about a half hour before. We drove back and did get to enjoy a beautiful sunset before eating our home-made spaghetti dinner. Ravi really loves the grill that they have here, so we also got to have Italian sausage with the pasta. At first, he tried to tell me that sausage would be really good with the sauce, but then he admitted that he just wanted to grill something, and that the sausage seemed like a good fit. And it actually was, so everyone wins.