Where I am right now: Maui, Hawaii
Why you should be here too: The sun is shining, the humpback whales are breaching right and left, and when the spring breakers head home, there will be even more space on the many pristine beaches.
Eat here: Finding bargain meals was a real challenge, but it’s not impossible – just don’t expect Colorado bargain prices. Cheap here means around $8-$10 per person for an entrée, although here and there we found things such as inexpensive wrap sandwiches in the $6-$7 range for lunch. Our favorite authentically local cheap meal was at Da’ Kitchen Express (2439 S. Kihei Road, 808-875-7782), which does noodle dishes (check out the Chow Fun, which comes with shredded beef, peppers and onions tossed with super-thick noodles for $7.75) and Hawaiian-style kalua pork (a huge portion for $8.25, with steamed rice and coleslaw). It’s greasy and carb-heavy, but also filling and addictive…Our favorite meal overall, though, had a Colorado connection: we couldn’t pass up a Takah Roll ($10.25) at Sansei Seafood & Sushi Bar (Kihei Town Center, 808-879-0004. sanseihawaii.com), which was listed as being inspired by Takah’s in Aspen. After we ate the fantastic combination (shrimp, ahi, crab and cucumber rolled inside-out and crusted with masago), we then had to know why one of Aspen’s favorite sushi spots would be referenced in Maui. Turns out Sansei’s owner D.K. Kodama trained with Takah Sama, and now has his own wonderful eatery. And if you can get in there during happy hour (reservations are crucial; the place has a line out the door from opening time at 5:30 p.m.), everything is 25 percent off…Lulu’s (1945 S. Kihei Road, 808-879-9944, lulushawaii.com) is a great open-air sports-watching bar and restaurant on the top floor at the back of Kihei Kalama Village (many were gathered to check out the Final Four). It serves top-notch burgers (try the Dick Butkus one with peanut butter for $9.95; it’s weird but tasty) and other pub grub, but we were happiest with the heavenly fried foods, including hot wings ($6.95 for a half-bucket), pork-filled wontons with mango sauce ($8.95), large popcorn shrimp ($10.95) and fried squid ($7.95)…The aforementioned inexpensive wraps came from Juice Zone (in the Maui Harbor Shops at Ma’alea, right across from the Pacific Whale Foundation on the top floor), where we ate a lunch of “garden” wraps (all vegetarian fillings for $5.95) and roasted turkey ($6.95) with smoothies made from freshly squeezed juices ($3.99 for 16-ouncers)…Some of the best fish and chips we’ve eaten anywhere (including England!) came from Alexander’s Fish & Chips (1913 S. Kihei Road, 808-874-0788). They offer ahi, ono and mahi deep-fried or grilled; after careful research, we highly recommend the mahi ($8.95), which always came out moist and coated in a crispy, seasoned batter. The chips are skin-on, and a slightly sweet, moist coleslaw comes with…Skip the dry fish and chips and go with the fish tacos at Leilani’s on the Beach (2435 Ka’anapali Parkway at Whaler’s Village, 808-661-4495, hulapie.com). The two tacos ($11.50) are enormous and come drizzled with a creamy, faintly spicy sauce and topped with cheese…Super-friendly service and a super-sweet breakfast can be had at Cinnamon Roll Fair (2463 S. Kihei Road, 808-879-5177), where $3.50 nets a fat spiral of goodness; another 50 cents can bring cream cheese icing, nuts and other toppings. You can get a good latte here too, and juices…If the buns hadn’t been stale, we would have loved the burgers at Cheeseburger Island Style Wailea (3750 Wailea Nui Dr., 808-874-8990, cheeseburgerland.com), a second outpost of Cheeseburger in Paradise in Laihana. The patties were delicious and toppings, such as bleu cheese and bacon ($9.95) worked; it’s also worth it to spring for the thick-cut onion rings ($5.50)…
Sleep at these places: When traveling with kids, I like to go the condo route whenever possible, mostly because it’s just more comfortable – everyone can spread out, there usually are laundry facilities, more beds and televisions, and the kitchen means the extra cost can often be offset by cooking several meals. Prices on Maui run the gamut, from very expensive to medium. Destination Resorts, which runs some great Colorado properties (the Inverness in Denver, The Gant in Aspen, Vail Cascade), has gorgeous condo units on golf and tennis properties at Wailea and Makena. Most of them are right on the beach or about a two-minute walk away. Wailea Ekahi has gloriously manicured lawns and great pools for cooling off at night and getting the kids to wind down a bit. Rates start at $470 a night.
Check out the relatively recently completed Wailea Beach Villas, which are individually owned (and they do have openings, but if you have to ask how much…), but they rent to the public too, starting at about $880 per night. This place takes luxury to the ultimate level, featuring an adults-only infinity pool, plasma TVs in all the rooms, every detail thought of and unbelievably accommodating attendants at your beck and call – setting up beach chairs, umbrellas, getting you lunch, you name it. (This is different from fractionals and timeshares, which we’ll explore in the April 29 Travel.)
Cheaper lodging can be found in Kihei, such as the cutie Nona Lani Cottages (455 S. Kihei Road, 800-733-2688, nonalanicottages.com), which are just a hop-skip to the beach, sleep four (two are on sleeper sofas), feature kitchens, on-premises laundry, TV and grill. Rates run $90-$120…The Pineapple Inn Maui (3170 Akala Dr., 877-212-6284, pineappleinnmaui.com) has a cottage available as well as regular rooms. The rooms have kitchenettes and TVs with VCRs, and the grounds have a pool and hot tub that look out over the ocean. The sweet little cottage sleeps four but you have to stay for six nights. Cottage is $185; rooms start at $110.
Shop here: It definitely was cheaper to cook a few meals at the condo, but be prepared for some sticker shock when you enter a grocery store on Maui. Four sticks of butter cost $6.75 and a half-gallon of milk was $5 – ouch. On Sunday I threw a New York Times down on the counter, and picked it right back up again when I found out it cost $7.75. It also was disconcerting to discover that much of the fish and seafood come from Vietnam and elsewhere, not right off the island, as we’d imagined it would (shrimp, though, was local). Still, the pineapple was cheap, fresh and plentiful (although after day four, my kids were threatening mutiny if I didn’t lay off it a bit), as were the other tropical fruits such as mangos and papaya. Safeway is open 24 hours, as is Foodland; both are located along the main roads around all of the larger cities and towns. Coffee from Kona also has a blessedly lower price tag than you’d find on the mainland.
Kihei seems to be the best place to find those great, cheesy souvenirs such as sarongs, ashtrays with hula dancers and other beach-oriented stuff. Vendors set up booths in the parking lots along South Kihei Road and promise “Big Sale Today Only” pretty much every day.
In Lahaina, the shops along Front Street are a little more upscale but offer terrific variety. It can get very hot on a sunny day, however, and parking is at a premium. Things are more chain-oriented at Whalers Village (2435 Ka’anapali Parkway) between Lahaina and Ka’anapali, where parking costs $3 an hour, but the merchants will validate for three hours’ worth of free parking; however, you do have to buy a minimum of $10 worth of merchandise to get it. The sign says “No Beach Parking,” but no one really checks.
My new best friend: Jim Freeheart, who just a few weeks ago fulfilled his dream of moving from Boulder to Maui. We were sitting on the beach one day and this affable guy comes along and just starts setting up an easel and his oils right next to us. Children immediately flocked to him, and he answered their questions, offered them materials to start their own artwork, shared his boogie board with them, and generally was one of the nicest guys imaginable. After an “it’s a small world” conversation, he confessed that he used to teach classes through the University of Colorado’s Science Discovery Program, and he still raises funds for Denver-area schools on his website with his giclee prints. He then proceeded to whip up a beautiful landscape of the surroundings that day. Check out his Colorado and Hawaii works at jimfreeheart.com.
My other new best friends: Anyone as weary of United Airlines as I am. Yes, weather happens, and many folks were stuck in San Diego for a day – and in the case of folks trying to reconnect internationally, several days – after fog diverted flights and hundreds missed their connections. But that came after a series of ridiculous, time-consuming and frustrating ticketing errors (oops! I had a ticket but my kids didn’t; then, oops! my kids had tickets and United forgot to book my seat with Island Air to get from Maui to Honolulu, and boy, do the employees at Island Air have a few things to say about United; and what’s up with overbooking and then making people stand in line to find out that the seating assignments won’t be given out until we get to the gate, where we have to stand in another line – particularly inconvenient on the connecting flight where we’re given an hour to get across a huge terminal and get our main meal of the day?)
And all of this happened after we got on a plane that was in such bad shape we literally bound the seat rest together with hair bands, and my seat bottom fell off the base if I moved around too much (and the audio didn’t work on the movie, and one of the flight attendants was unbearably rude), and it came after we had to go back to the gate for an hour and a half because, oops!, “Sorry, folks, but we have some luggage issues.”
So when these kinds of things are becoming commonplace, and then a major setback causes a lot of people to be stranded for a day or two, the main aim of the employees should be to help people get where they need to go. Instead, we were led to believe that while we were wandering around in the air, agents were working on getting us new flights, when in fact we were shoved off the plane and given conflicting information about what to do next (The crew announced that we were to call the United toll-free number if we needed to get back to Chicago or Denver, but I had done that while we were waiting in Ontario, Calif., and the ticketing agent I spoke with then had rather crankily told me that she could not help me, that I had to deal with United in San Diego. Hours later, there were no flights, we waited in multiple lines, no one from United ever did anything helpful, and we wound up with an unexpected $160 food and lodging bill. Sorry, United says, they didn’t make the fog.
Well, no kidding, but they sure did make a bad situation worse.
For the full story on Maui and elsewhere in Hawaii, check out Sept. 9 Travel.
Travel editor Kyle Wagner can be reached at 303-954-1599 or travel@denverpost.com.
