Blogging the Past: 20th Anniversary

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2004 was our 20th wedding anniversary and we celebrated by taking a trip to Hawaii. Julie had said "it has to be somewhere we've never been before, it has to be cooler than Austin, and there has to be pampering".

After some consideration, I settled on the Hotel Hana Maui, a ranch-style hotel and spa on the north shore of Maui. I was able to rent a bay cottage that had a direct view of the ocean with no buildings in front of it. It was very much like taking a cruise without all the tedium of being on a boat with 2000 other people.

This picture was taken from the main restaurant at the hotel, where we took most of our meals (those that we didn't take on the beach or poolside).

If you follow this picture's link to Flickr, you'll see that I've used a new feature of Flickr to associate the picture with a point on a map (it's the "taken in Maui, Hawaii (map)" entry in the "additional information" part of the picture's page). If you follow that link and then zoom in on the map you can see a very clear satellite picture of the hotel.

Anyway, we had a great time in Hawaii. It was, we knew, our last chance to travel as a childless couple and we made the most of it. But now I very much want to go back to Hawaii with Dada (and ideally her cousins Sophia, Julia, and Booker). There's barely a day goes by that I don't think about Hawaii and how nice it was there and how much I'd like to go back.

In addition to Hana, we spent a couple of days at a big hotel on the other side, after a fun drive around the south side of the island. We got to do a little snorkeling around reefs and such and went up to the top of the Haleakala volcano.