Meme Monday – Treacherous Road

Last week in Maui, we had some time to kill and not a big plan, but couldn’t go out for an all day thing, as we had plans in the middle of the afternoon. Maya likes her chill time, so she decided to stay home, and Ted and I went for a drive. We were staying in Kahana, which is on the North West side of Maui. Our trusty guide book mentioned a drive that would take you to see the Nakalele Blowhole. I’ve never seen a blowhole before, and our part of Maui was fairly arid, being on the leeward side, so we wanted to go around and get at least a little bit on the windward side of the island, and see some more lush topography. This is the blowhole, if you can see my video (I know sometimes it doesn’t render in WordPress. You can go to the link above to see photos.). We did NOT hike down to see it up close, neither of us had the right shoes on for the wet rocky terrain, and we did not feel like injuries were a part of the plan. It was very cool, though, and shot up pretty darned high. People have died getting too close, by either falling in or being swept out to sea by large waves, but thankfully no one seems to have died on that particular day.

(Wow, I just watched that with sound on…hadn’t before. Sorry, the sound is horrible…it’s just really windy there. That’s what you’re hearing if you decide to watch the video. I don’t remember it sounding that bad when we were there, but it was loud.)

We went a little too far, and we accidentally came across this one lane, two way road that is a sheer cliff with falling rocks on one side, then a sheer fall down the other side, the Kahekili Highway. Perhaps if we had read about it in our guide book ahead of time, and knew what we were getting into, it would have been OK…but we were just driving along, enjoying ourselves, and suddenly found ourselves on this crazy and terrifying road. Terrifying because there are rocks on the road quite often, so you know when the sign says “falling rock”, you know they mean it. It is a very twisty turny road, so you never know when you’re going to come around a corner to someone driving from the other direction, and you cannot pass each other unless one of you backs up, and if you’re backing up, what if you drive your rental car into the sheer cliff and knock some rocks down on you? Or what if other driver is backing up and panics and falls to their death? I’m not sure how a tow truck would get to you. It’s crazy. And lush and beautiful.

I would certainly not do it again, but it was beautiful. I was too nervous to take any pictures of the road itself. But there was a spot when we were waiting for someone coming the other way to back up a bit (we were the third car going our direction on our way back, which made us feel a LOT better than when we were going the first direction and no one else around…), I took this lovely picture out of the window of the car.

On the way back, we stopped to pick up some famous Banana Bread at a little roadside table. It was not the stand shown in the link above, that would have been even further down that scary road, so we did not do that. This was a man sitting under a tent at a table on a little roadside area with parking. The cute thing was that he has trained some mongooses (mongeese?) to come running out of the brush when he made a loud ‘HUH!’ Noise, so if someone dropped crumbs on the ground, 5 or 6 of the little critters would come running.  Very cute.

The banana bread was good, it tasted like banana bread. I wished they had some with nuts, but the guy said that so many people have nut allergies, in order to make some with nuts, “Auntie Julia would have to have a separate kitchen, and she doesn’t want to do that.” So no nuts it was. It was light yet not dry, which was nice. They were also selling some pineapple lemonade, which wasn’t great. It tasted like pineapple juice and country time lemonade mixed together, which may have been the recipe. I wanted it to be more authentic, fresh lemonade.

Anyway, it was definitely an adventure. I’ll tell you about a few more we had, that did not feel like mistakes.