We’re flying United, with a 2-hour lay over in San Francisco. The flight to SF was quite smooth with no airport delay. We actually arrived earlier and had almost 3 hours to burn. The SF airport has a nice eatery. They don’t have the usual east coast restaurant selections like McDonalds, Philly Steak & Cheese; instead, they have a Chinese dim sum place (Fung Lum), a Japanese sushi outfit (Tomokazu) and a pizza joint (Firewood Café Brick Oven Pizza). We sampled the dim sum and sushi, expensive, but quite good for airport standard. Comparing the food quality here to our last vacation trip to Zion, Utah, the so called food at the Las Vegas airport was just plain lousy. We had a grilled chicken green salad that was made up of iceberg lettuce and rubber chicken that cost $9. Over here in SF, there is an outfit called Just Desert, featuring all sorts of cheese and mousse cakes. It’s quite tempting to bring a piece onto the plane for the second leg of the journey. In this day and age when the airlines are skimping and just serve boxed meals, the airports should take the opportunity to serve up some good competitions.

Just Desert at San Francisco Airport

The two hour wait went by relatively quickly while we sampled the airport food and wrote this log. Of course, we bought a piece of the chocolate mousse cake for the plane ride. It turned out to be excellent.

The second leg was flown in a 767. The flight was only about half full so we could really stretch out. By the time we arrived at Maui, the sun was about to set over the west Maui mountains. There were rain clouds in the area and signs of a recent passing shower. The temperature was in the balmy cool 70’s with lots of moisture in the air. What a big difference from metro Washington DC, which had been in the 50’s. The fall season in the north east had been cooler than usual in the last month. Sophia was very happy.

Landing at Kahalui Airport

This was a 2 week vacation where we would be staying at 3 different locations on Maui, including 4 nights on south Maui, 2 nights in Hana on the north side, and finally 6 nights on the west side. For south Maui, we were staying at a coastal town called Kihei.

By the time we picked up our rental car and arrived at Kihei (see yellow dot on adjacent map), it was already pitch dark, about 6:30PM local time. It was a long traveling day. We were staying at a condo named Koa Lagoon, overlooking the ocean.

By the way, we have visited Hawaii a number of times, there are a couple of travel tips that we’ve found to be extremely helpful. The most important thing is to bring a GPS or to rent one from the car rental company. Hawaii street names are mostly in Hawaiian, and many of them sound very similar to mainlanders, such as Kukui and Kihei. Imagine driving at night looking for street signs that are mostly spelled the same way. Another thing is to get a really good guide book, such as the Maui Revealed from Wizard Publishing. Even the locals swear by them.

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