Critters

For some reason, it seemed like the animal kingdom was doing it's best to stop the wedding (or at least ruin the photo's). After my encounter with Zooey, my sister-in-laws possessed cat, upon landing in Maui I was set upon by mosquitoes. At first I was bit in the hand, then on the side of my forehead. By day three the little b*s had caused me ear to swell double its size (visible on some of the Luau photo's).

Here's a comparison ear-to-ear:

 

As if my ego  wasn't bruised enough, Donna made me wear some sort of plastic face mask the night before the big day which made me look like an android from the movie A.I.:

 Jude Wes

Must Do Checklist: The Luau

It's one of those extremely expensive tourist things that has to be done, so here we are queuing on the beach, near twilight waiting to get our hands on those free complimentary Mai Tai's.

To be fair, it was a free bar and all you can eat, what else could you ask for?

Here's the pig going into the ground. For those that don't know, a Luau is where they cook a whole pig in the ground before serving it up.

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Basil Tomatoes

So we finally settled in and on the first night we decided to all go out together and sample some of the local cuisine. Mike recommended Basil Tomatoes just down the road from Ka'anapali. I have a video of the event but I haven't got round to editing yet.

Some of the highlights include being served by the militant waitress we nicknamed 'butch' (wait till you see the video) and being served purified 'clear' milk (also in the video).

Mike had already finished his drink at this point. I guess no one has mentioned to him that you toast first and then drink.

Since we paid for the meal on my card, we ended up with a fistful of dollars. I didn't get to play with it long, as Donna was already comfortably getting ready to be in wife-mode.

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Maui

After arriving overnight, driving in the dark along the coast to find the Ka'anapali Villas where we would be staying we finally got to glimpse the beauty of the island of Maui. Far left is Donna overlooking a place where whales can be spotted. Unfortunately we were too early in the season to see them.

Left is a lava rock beach close to Makena Cove, south of the island where we were 3 days from sealing the deal.

Below, some trees behind Makena Beach where I was ambushed by a Mosquito and Donna standing on Makena Beach.

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Flying Cattle

We finally set out from Vancouver airport on 24th October, Gina is pictured above, at the check-in. I guess we were all so excited about going that we didn't think that the taxi ride to the airport would get us there so punctually. As you can see in the picture the place looked a bit empty. At first we thought it was going to be a quiet flight....until we realised that we were about an hour too early. We were there before the check-in desks were even open. Now that's excited.

Anyway once we were finally on the flight we realised that this holiday chartering business was not as comfy as one would like. The 5 hours on the flight with WestJet felt longer than the 8 hours from Heathrow to Calgary with Air Canada. WestJet were cheap, so cheap that they even felt they could charge us extra for in-flight video entertainment. The only problem is if you didn't want to pay you still had to face the video screen that had been installed on the back of every chair, blinking away an advertisement that bragged the advantages of buying the rights to view more then the advertisement itself. In the end the dumb video was out of order anyway and no one would get a chance to sample the fine array of movies they would've had to offer. Gina found a better use for the back of the chair in front of her and simply fell asleep. Nice one.

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