Moving to Paradise: Enjoy the Simple Things on Maui

As I've said before, living in Maui is like groundhog day everyday. The weather is almost always beautiful, the seasons never change to mark a certain month just by looking around, and everyone gets stuck in a routine, as most do on the mainland. Although we do have 2 seasons. Whale season, and not whale season. The only way I know what month it is, is either- are there whales playing in ocean nearby, and how busy is it in the restaurant. IF it's busy, it still means it could be summer, winter, Spring break time, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Years. Or is it slower than usual... it could be the period between summer and thanksgiving, early December, between winter end to spring break, or after spring break before summer.So in the end... What day is it?

Now I am constantly doing something. My days off are filled with writing essays and studying for my online schooling towards getting my Bachelor's, or I am working, modeling, teaching Zumba, or trying to have some quality dinner time with my husband once a week (maybe twice). I feel like we've forgotten how lucky we are to live where we do and aren't taking full advantage of enjoying it's beauty and spontaneously exploring whenever we can! So we've made more of an effort to enjoy this island's beauty and lifestyle in the simple ways.

So one night we took our dinner and TV routine down to a semi secluded beach

We ate our chilled pasta salad and drank wine

The ocean and island beauty is way more entertaining than a television

Trying to do cartwheels

Key word TRYING

We hung out all night drinking wine and talking about life, philosophy, and God.
With many shooting stars to accompany our full moon view of the ocean

We love to hike the Kapalua Walking Trail up to the "duck pond"

Wild non-GMO, non-perticides, organic guavas grow all over the place up there

So we go guava picking and eat some for snacks along the hike

We visit our friend Fred who is a stray that people leave water bottles and cat food for others to help feed him when needed

Sometimes we'll bring some wine and a book to read as we munch on guavas

And make guava jelly afterwards. YUM

It makes for a great snack for the next few weeks!

Kapu= Respect. Tourists think its spiritual to stack stones, when its almost offensive to the locals who see it as people messing with the ancient Hawaiian land as those stones were never stacked before. Locals may stack stones to find their way back on a trail but out in the middle of no where, don't stack stones.

Then we go exploring up North of West Maui. We see the tourist spots that conceirge or guidebooks advertise, and we walk the other direction and find little gems like this

We always find something cool/interesting/weird on our adventures. There were dead red crab all over the place in this little hidden cove, their skeletons left and a hole in the back of their shell where the birds pecked out their insides from. Kinda sad :(

Jon up top there

And from his view, I'm that tiny red dot haha

Behind the advertised Nakalele Blowhole (with 20+ people surrounding it),
we found this little blow hole, all to ourselves

Jon getting blow away!! hahah

The Nakalele Lighthouse, maybe 40 feet high. There's no way to get up except by doing a pull up all the way to getting your knee on the first step. Did I mention the wind was like 30mph. Of course it's no big deal for Jon

So I faced my small fear of heights (thanks mom, I got that from you). Jon pushed me up to the first step because obviously I can't do a pull up all the way, or even halfway. With sweaty palms and only rusty steps to hold onto and no safeguard around me, I just couldn't make it to the tippy top. Oh the wind, it could have taken me right off that lighthouse too haha!