All day tour

Sunday morning we woke up to another beautiful day here in paradise. We planned on going to Church and knew that it was Stake Conference this week. The Stake Center is in Kahului which is in the middle of the island about 22 miles away. Church started at 8 am so we had to get an early start. As we drove over to Kuhului we could see that there were no clouds hovering over the Haleakala volcano which is quite unusual. We decided that if it was still cloudless after Church we'd drive on up and check it out.

Two hours later, it was still cloudless! Yea!!! The last time we were here on Maui was back in 1997. We came with Katie and Cam and one of the really fun, exciting outings we did was to get driven up to the top of the volcano at 5 am and be there when the sun came up and then hop on bicycles and ride the 35 miles back down the volcano! I remember it being really fun but I don't remember anything else about the surroundings. I didn't realize that this road was a long, twisting, thankfully 2 lanes wide, perfectly paved highway but the speed limit was still mostly no higher than 20 mph. It is a really unique ride and it traverses all kinds of landscape from pastures to volcanic rock flows. This is what it looks like up at 10,032 feet above sea level! We really lucked out because the whole trip was cloudless until we started driving back down and by then it didn't matter to us any more.

Before we came on our trip, Paul had this crazy idea that he wanted to ride his bicycle UP the volcano so our car ride was a recon trip to see what the uphill climb looked like. NO WAY, JOSE is what we learned from the roadtrip. Seriously, that is not a very enticing bike ride. Paul typically likes to bike uphill but this was insane!

There was one more road that he wanted to check out as a possible biking route. There is a road that goes around the north side of the island from Kuhului back to Kahana, where we are staying. It is about 32 miles which is a very doable number.

I am here to give a very stern warning to anyone coming to Maui, ever... NEVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, DRIVE THIS ROAD! It was horrendous! It made the road to Hana seem like a freeway! I have never been so glad to get off a back road in my entire life! And I don't really get freaked out easily. For at least 15 miles, the road way only 1 lane, with NO shoulder and most of the way with NO guardrails either. It was full of sharp, blind turns. The speed limit was posted at 5 mph and at times I thought that was too fast! There were several times when we had to back up to let another car pass us. Going forward was frightening; you can imagine how we felt about backing up! We passed lots of ranches and homes -- people live out here and drive this road on a daily basis! They must be insane! I would buy a helicopter before I'd ever drive this road again. And then we saw the school bus for the kids! There is not way in creation I'd put a child on a school bus on this road. And we weren't even dealing with rain or wind or blinding clouds.

When we finally got past the worst part of the road, we had to pull over and take in the calming scenery for a while. Every time a car passed us heading towards the awful part of the road we had just come over, I wanted to stop them and tell them to TURN
AROUND while they still could. Paul is banned from considering a bike ride over there too! (by joint decision!)