Maui waves

Home again. We spent 3 weeks in California getting reorganized after our trip to France and New England, visiting various and sundry friends and doing laundry. We had a couple of visits with my mother, and participated in our neighborhood's disaster preparedness drill, which involved updating and expanding our disaster cache of food, water and survival tools.

Then it was off to Maui, where time slowed down and almost stopped. Lots of naps, lots of sunsets, lots of reading. Tom's brother Bob and wife Lee Ann came for Thanksgiving week. Their trip began in Kauai, so we prevailed upon them to bring us two lilikoi (passionfruit) chiffon pies, a specialty of that island. So our Thanksgiving dinner featured not just turkey and stuffing, but lilikoi pie. For those of you now freezing in the cold snap on the mainland, it was (and is) 83 degrees during the day, and between 63 and 68 at night. And you should hear the whining when dips down to 63!

Since it made the front page of the New York Times, it is apparently not a secret that we are enjoying historically large waves this week. Some are purportedly 50 feet high. We went across the island today to take a look at Hookipa Beach where there are usually surfers and wind surfers. Today the beach is closed completely -- and they meant it. Police cars were posted at the entrance and exit to the beach park to make sure no one could enter. The lookout above the park was open, so we stopped to take a look. We don't think these waves were 50 feet, more like 20 to 30. But they were powerful. We thought about going to Jaws, a famous surfing area not far away, but it doesn't have a beach at all (surfers are towed by jet ski from a beach a couple of miles away). There is a small lookout, and we had heard that a couple of thousand people had walked there yesterday. So we decided that even though the waves might be larger there, we'd seen what we needed to see.