A Typical Day In Maui

All right, now for the couple of posts I promised a couple weeks ago. See, definitely not a procrastinator!

A typical day in Maui with a side of extra stuff that happens in a week. How's that sound?! Anyways, hopefully this will be interesting a give you a better idea of what we do around here when we are gone for "six years."

The time difference between where we live in Texas and here in Maui is 5 hours. So we like to not get into a routine of sleeping in really late even though this is vacation. Otherwise adjusting back to home time would be very difficult. Or at least a lot more difficult than it already is. Long story short, we normally get up between 6:30 and 7:30 in the morning.

Mom often goes to have her coffee and quiet time early and I like to slip out to the porch around 7:00 to have my quiet time.

The cabana on the beach does not open until 9:30. That doesn't mean you can't go down to the beach before then, but we like to go when it is open so we can put our food in the refrigerator and get towels and have access to the showers and bathrooms. (We don't so much like to go for "just using the ocean.")

We keep breakfast easy and have eggs and toast and sausage, or waffles and fruit, or yogurt and fruit and granola. Sometimes a protein shake is added to that. The tables in our rooms are never big enough to seat all of us, so some people eat outside on the porch, which we almost never get to do at home, and of course at home we can't see the ocean while eating, so it's pretty wonderful.

After breakfast we work on school and pack a lunch and get ready for the beach. Everyone can put their own swimsuit on, but we help each other with sunscreen and hair braiding. And, I am proud to say, ALL the boys in our family can braid hair.

The beach is only about a 5 or so minute walk from our room and takes that long because we have to walk around the golf course instead of through it. Wouldn't want to get hit in the head by a golf ball on vacation really so...

In the mornings the water is most calm typically, but the roughness of the waves and the strength of the currents varies day to day. All of us are pretty accustomed to "reading" the ocean and gauging it's safety according to each of our own swimming capabilities. All that fancy wording is to say, we usually know what we are doing when we get in the ocean.

Most of the time we play on the beach or in the water, doing gymnastics, or running from waves, or looking for sea glass (sea glass is literally glass that has been in the ocean for a while and has been smoothed out by the waves tumbling it in the rocks and sand), or just floating in the waves, or snorkeling by Black Rock (Black Rock is literally a big rock jutting out in the ocean with lots of other volcano black rock boulders piled around it that are some in and some out of the water and lots of fish and other sea life live around them).

Mom and I especially enjoying reading in the cabana either in or out of the sun.

We eat lunch whenever we are hungry. That we also keep simple with usually sandwiches, or a salad, or leftovers from restaurants, or something like that. Sweet Maui Onion Potato Chips usually make frequent appearances as do various types of fruits and vegetables.

In the afternoon the waves tend to be a little bigger, but not so that we don't want to be in the water, not at all! That is the time we enjoy boogie boarding and bobbing in the waves past the breaking point. (Boogie boarding is riding a small body board in the waves from the breaking point, which is where the waves hit the beach, onto the sandy beach area.)

Afternoon is also a good time to escape the more intense sun-rays by playing poker, 31, Go Fish, Scrabble, Spades, Rummikub, Hand and Foot, or some other game with each other and our "Maui Grandparents."

We usually go back to our condo room sometime between 4:00 and 5:30 for showers. If we eat dinner in the room (salad, pasta, leftovers, etc) then we also will watch a movie. Or if we go out to Lahaina for dinner then by the time we get back it's time to go to bed. Bedtime is anywhere between 8:30 and 9:30.

Obviously on Sunday mornings we have church before the beach.

And that is pretty much what a day looks like!