Aloha Maui!

Hello everyone! So if you've been following my social media pages, you have discovered that we are at it again. We jetted down to Maui for a nice vacation after a great time spent with family on Thanksgiving. Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and got to pig out on good food, enjoy some good conversations, time spent with loved ones, and maybe a few libations. We decided this was a nice way to break up the holiday season, by sneaking in a quick getaway to Hawaii.

So we left out of Sacramento at 7am. Not ideal, but when you arrive in paradise by 11am, you can't be too disappointed about it. We flew Hawaiian Airlines. Since we were doing a multi-destination trip (we are headed to Oahu after this for a couple of days), Hawaiian was the better deal. Full disclosure, I normally always try to fly Alaska when I can. I just feel like their customer service is top notch, plus they used to be one of the flew airlines that flew direct from Sacramento in Maui.

The flight was pretty comfortable. We spoiled ourselves this time and upgraded to First class. Considering other flights, it was actually quite reasonable for the upgrade. The seats were really comfortable, and felt brand new. We were quickly greeted with a beverage of choice, I of course decided on a Pog and Champagne. Pog is Hawaiian juice that stands for Passion fruit, Orange and Guava juice. We were quickly seated and left on time.

The service during the flight itself was okay. Having sat in First Class before, they typically serve you a meal and snacks throughout the flight. Plus, you reap the benefit of having free booze. :) After the breakfast was served, the service somewhat stopped. It may have been the time that the flight left, seeing as how we had to be at the airport at around 5:45am, they may have thought we wanted to sleep during the flight. However since it was the start of our vacation, and we were flying first class, the last thing I felt like doing was sleeping. We enjoyed our own iPads and watched a couple of movies to get us through the next five hours. Two movies and a couple of drinks and we had landed in Maui.

If you have never been to Maui, the best way, in my opinion, is to rent a condo or timeshare. This helps to breakup the monotony of hotel living, so you can make yourself breakfast and or lunch in the room, and cocktails at your leisure. Right outside the airport in Maui is a Costco, which makes it perfect to grab what you need and go. We grabbed our rental car, hit up Costco and made our drive over to Kaanapali. This trip we are staying with a friend of ours who has a two bedroom condo at the Westin Nanea. This timeshare just opened about a year ago and it is really nice. The picture above is your view right when you walk through the front door. We were quickly greeted at the valet, and made it through the line to checkin relatively quickly. The best part was, even though we had sprung for quite a few groceries at Costco and Safeway, even though our room was not ready, they took all of our groceries and packed them into their freezers to keep everything cool until our room was ready. We headed to the bar on grounds by the pool, had a couple of drinks and our room was ready to go.

So far we are very happy with the accommodations, having a full two bedroom condo, with two master bedrooms, a kitchen, living room, and balcony with an amazing view of the beach. We have done a few excursions so far including golf and whale watching; not to mention walking around and exploring Front Street. We are heading out right now to enjoy another beautiful day in paradise. I will write more soon! Aloha everyone! Thanks for reading.