Maui no ka 'oi!

Just got back from Hawaii, Maui to be exact, and the title of this post is Hawaiian (if you hadn't guessed by now). It literally translates to something like "Maui is the best", and it's easy to see how this saying became popular.

We had a bit of a stressful return trip, but for the most part, it was spectacular. This is going to be a pretty image heavy post... Actually I probably wont talk much at all other than some captions on the images. Enjoy. :)

This is the group (sans-me. That's the photographer's curse--you're always behind the camera.)

Which makes this the whole group. This was supposed to be our "family picture" but I'm not sure if we'll keep it or not... There are some funny faces in that shot :p The picture was taken on a whale-watching cruise at sunset. We saw some pretty spectacular things on those boats!

Here's Laura skipping a rock on a black-sand beach. The sand is black because it's from volcanic rock.

This is a shot of the sign warning people about rip-currents. If you don't know what a rip-current or rip-tide is, basically when wave after wave washes up towards shore they bring a lot of water. All that water needs to go somewhere. The water rushes back out in a line and can carry sand, debris, and careless swimmers out with it. All my life I was told to watch out for rip currents and avoid them at all costs... turns out you actually use them to get out into the surf. Which brings us to.. SURFING!

Pictured above is Laura, "Pops" and me learning how to surf. Don't we look awesome?

This is Sherman, the guy who taught us to surf. He looks pensive.

Sherman again. What a crazy guy.

Laura catching her first wave. She stood up her first try. I knew there was no way I could do anything other than stand up on my first try too after that.

So I did.

A pretty fish we saw snorkling.

Snorkling. Laura was wearing a wet suit and had a hard time staying underwater because it made her float.

Me snorkling.

Laura snorkling.

My attempts to get a "tunnel" wave shot with laura's mom's waterproof point-and-shoot.

I'd love to caption this, but to be honest I have no idea what he's doing.

Waterfall!

The closest whale breach we saw all trip!

Tail-slapping baby whale.

Happy eskimo! (in hawaii??)

Bottle-nose Dolphins! If you look close, you'll see it's actually a mom and baby dolphin (the nose of the baby is around halfway down the mom, just behind the little area of bubbles in the shot) they were bow-riding.

Watching a baby whale spy-hopping. Spy-hopping is a fairly rare whale behavior in which the whale pokes its head above water and keeps it there for an extended period of time. No one really knows why they do it, but it's assumed the whale does it to "spy" on the world around it above-water.

A baby whale practicing 'breaching'. Once again, we really don't know why whales do this, but it's assumed to be some form of communication.