maui: the story

I am not going to tell a poetic story, or cry onto my keyboard about how amazing my boyfriend . . . but he is, and it was. Amazing. Maui sounded so cliche to me until I got there, when I realized we landed on a very green, sunny slice of heaven :)

Here is my story :)

So first things first . . . Joe gets a lovely little piece of mail telling him that Pacific University's Island Eyes conference this year is on Ka'anapali Beach at The Sheraton. Sounds marvelous! I say . . . Sounds expensive! Says Joe. And honestly, I'm not quite sure at what point we decided to do it, but within a few months of this beautiful brochure arriving in our mailbox, we had two tickets booked and a giant write-off planned for River Rock Vision Center. :)

Here is the view from a lounge in our hotel:



Day One on da beach . . . we had some work to do in the tanning department ;)



Day Five on da beach . . . my work is done :)



I took a lot of photos of palm trees.



See?







Fresh from the ocean! When Joe first told me that he LOVES to be in the water most of the time, I was a little concerned that we wouldn't be spending a lot of time together because I'm a big beach-sitter-people-watcher and usually only go in for a minute to cool off . . . but I jumped in everytime he wanted to and we swam and swam and swam and dove into waves and it was absolutely perfect :)



The most famous Black Rock was at our hotel, and while we never witnessed the official dive or lighting of the torches, we saw a LOT of people jump off the rock. We were planning on doing it on our last day but the comfort of the poolside chairs and cocktails and sandy beach and happy hour kept us back :)











Awww . . . The MoJoe . . . I'm a big fan of NOT taking individual photos of one another the whole vacation, so we had to use Joe's long arm a few times :)





THIS cracks me up because this is how Joe sleeps, and always has since he was a babe. Arms stretched nice right behind the ol' noggin . . . whenever I wake up and see him like this I always smile (sometimes in my mind because it's soooo early) . . . it's his quirky little thing that I adore.





And this is what it looks like every morning from room 6413 . . . Joe went all out on this vacation to give us the best of the best of everything he could, including a room on a cliff with unobstructed ocean views. I've already said he's amazing, right?



Here we are at dinner, one of our last nights in Maui, having our best meal at Cane & Taro.



And my most favorite part of the trip . . . I fell in love with Joe a little bit deeper, not because of the material products I received, but because he has the desire to truly make me happy. And Coach makes this girl happy. We were just a few nights into our trip and walking around Whalers Village when he brought me into the store and said, Pick out a bag, Mo. I said, Ha, yeah right, Joe. And he looked at me and said, I'm serious. I want to do this for you. Well, I didn't want to argue with him anymore about it because, I mean, we were on vacation and who wants to fight on vacation? So I picked out a bag. And then I picked out a clutch. And he got a lot of points on his Visa. : ) And here we are at the Coach store expressing our true feelings about the situation.



So what exactly did we do, you ask? It was a perfect week of relaxing by the pool with a cocktail, laying on the beach, snorkeling black rock. We took a day off from the sun to visit the aquarium and drive up the coast. And we spent our last day at the North Shore in Paia and driving the road to Haleakala Crater. We got everything we ever wanted from this vacation . . . time together, a complete break from work and the real world, warm air, the sound of the ocean. Ahhhhh.

Bye-bye, Maui. I promise we'll be back next year!