Adventures of Lahunalakalili'i and Palikalapalu

Sunday we did church and "the road to Hana."

At church on Sunday morning (we went to Sacrament Meeting in the Kihei Ward) someone gave some history of the Christmas celebration in their talk. I knew it had something to do with an old Roman pagan holiday. Apparently about 100BC the Romans picked up some religious worship from the Middle East where they were conquering. There was a sun god Mythras who's birthday they celebrated on Dec. 25 because of the winter solstice. Apparently they had trees and gifts and everything. Christians adopted the holiday and celebrated Christ's birth instead. When I heard this I first thought it was unfortunate to mix the celebration of Jesus Christ's birth with a pagan holiday, but then I thought what a nice way to change a holiday that they wanted to celebrate anyway into something meaningful. Maybe we need to do something about Halloween. :)

At the end of church we sang 'Aloha ae' to a family that was leaving the ward.

We started our trip to Hana pretty late in the morning. We were on the rode by 10:45am. It was a great trip. Someone lent us a CD that points out sights to see. Wow it was a beautiful trip. We went through a rain forest, and parts of the road were surrounded by a tall bamboo forest. The cost was beautiful, rocky, and blue. We pulled off the road in a couple of places, including to get buy fresh fruit and to get pictures with parrots, but we were pretty much in a hurry to get to the end of the trip and back during the day-light. One village we stopped in had a great view of a waterfall that we wouldn't have seen from the main road, but by the time Larisa pulled the camera out clouds had swept in and blocked our view.

Hana was a nice little town that Larisa enjoyed, but we continued on to the "seven pools" about 15 miles further down the road. The road made it quite an adventure; it had about a hundred little single car bridges as you drive on the edge of the cliff. Once we got to the end we hiked around, but the water was too swift for swimming that day. In all the trip took us about 9 hours (even though we traveled only about 100 miles round trip), but it was a good Sunday activity.