Our day began at the big time of 2:15 am. Yes, boys and girls, you heard it right. We were going to bike down the Haleakela Crater—one of the world’s largest dormant volcanos! We were picked up at 2:45 am and driven to the Mountain Riders place where we watched an informational video. We all then piled back in (there were 13 of us, a driver named Kona, and our guide- hillbilly Bobby from Kentucky who was hilarious!). We had a sleepy 2 hour drive up to the top of the crater, where we got out of the van into about 30 degree temperatures and wind gusts of about 100 mph. We literally had to hold on to the rails to stand up—I about fell over several times. We had to wear these lovely bright blue (Shane) and yellow (me) wind suits and ski gloves (in Maui!). We already had on a couple layers of clothing, and these wind suits on top of them still didn’t do much good. The wind was fierce and we were struggling to even look out into the sunset, but boy oh boy was it worth it. The colors were just brilliant, pictures just don’t even do it justice, and the clouds were below up blowing UP the side of the volcano. We stayed up there as long as we could to try to see all of God’s wonder, and then headed back down to the van to have juice and a muffin. They had already decided not to bike down from where we were, due to the windy conditions, so we traveled on down to see if it might be less windy back down the crater a little bit. We got to the visitor’s center and it was still just too windy—they were worried about our safety—being blown off of a bike on the side of a volcano on your honeymoon trip to Maui is just not a good day. We traveled on down and little more and the winds died down a lot. We actually decided to travel back on up a little and go ahead and bike the remaining 29 miles (we only lost about 9 miles or so and we all felt a little safer at a lower elevation!). We wore motorcycle helmets and used our brakes very minimally. It was scary at first, but we all got the hang of it. They didn’t want us to brake, they wanted us to coast down, but that gets a little scary at some points in time! It was incredibly beautiful and such a neat experience. We stopped in a little cowboy town close to the bottom for breakfast. It was actually at a Mexican restaurant, but it was yummy. We met some fun people and enjoyed spending time with them. We hopped back on the bikes and continued down to to ocean level in the little town of Pai’a. We took some pictures at the beach (we had stripped down layers of clothing since it was hot again!) and got back in the van. We went back to the Mountain Riders place, tipped the dudes, got a t-shirt, and Kona drove us back to the hotel where we crashed for a little while (me for an hour, Shane for about 3 hours). I went down to lay out at the beach for a couple of hours.
I returned back to the room and we got ready to head to dinner and Warren and Annabelle’s Magic Show. We chose a restaurant called Kino’s for dinner. It was right on the water and we had yummy food (Shane had Opah again and I had Polynesian chicken). We ordered a “Hula Pie” for desert—that thing was HUGE and yummmyyy…we couldn’t even finish the one we shared. We left there and walked down to the magic show. Warren is a comedian/magician and “Annabelle” is a ghost that plays a piano in the parlor while we are waiting to go in. She will play anything anyone requests…it was really cute. We finally went in and the show was just wildly funny! He was very southern and had such fun, clean humor. He picked on people in the audience and named them characters on the Andy Griffith show. The guy that he picked for “Gomer” really got it good—it was hilarious. Shane answered a question during the show about the lady that owned the restaurant and made pickles. We got a buy one get one free meal voucher for that one! The rest of the show was so good and we would highly recommend it to anyone who visits! We left at around 11:30 and returned back to the hotel!