Hawaii Day Nine – ZipLine and a Final Evening on Maui

Back to waking up at an unreasonable hour … for some of us.

Pam and Tom heard their alarm clock go off at 4:00 AM. This was needed if they wanted to make it to the start of their EcoTours ZipLine Adventure by 6:45. (but I’m NOT a morning person exclaims Pam!) Dave and Linda slept in today (lucky them!).

We sign all of the typical legal papers and initial all of the line items that confirm to EcoTours that we understand we may be injured, mamed, or die as a result of ziplining and we can’t sue them (sigh….what did we sign up for…). We get our souvenir water bottle, fill it with bottled water from cooler, so we attached to our “gear” when we go out. But now we wait. We’re waiting for two more people. The phone rings….they’re lost. The folks from EcoTours stand out side to wave them in…..a car shows up with two elderly people and a 11 year old. Clearly this can’t be them….. Ah but it is! Grandmom decided it would be fun to take her grand daughter zipping. The grandfather stayed behind. The granddaughter proceeds to tell me she’s afraid of heights….. Like the rest of us waiting to start this adventure, neither of them have ever zipped before.

The plot thickens…. A 12 passenger van shows up, covered in red mud. Oops … no one told us we shouldn’t wear nice, clean white sneakers for this trip. We all look at our shoes and then at each other with some concern written across our faces. Oh, well … too late now. We meet other folks from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oregon, and Washington. We’re all here to fly across chasms on a ¾ inch steel cable, hanging by two nylon web straps, in a harness that goes around the waist and each leg (like a seat), and attached by a stainless steel trolley. And none of us have ever done this before. Fun!

Time to get rolling! We load up and start driving up the mountain. The roads used to be sugar cane plantation roads, but they haven’t been maintained in years. The bumping and swaying of the van is amazing … can’t see how the van survives this day in and day out. With the amount of mud from the day before rain storms, I would have predicted we couldn’t possibly climb the mountain in this thing. But the driver is good … navigates switchback after switchback to get to the “gear shack” to meet our guides and get our gear attached to us. These guys are like surfer-dudes turned zippers … an interesting crew.

The first thing they tell us is, nice white sneakers. They chuckle…. (did I really pay for this adventure???) They get us hooked up, store our remaining valuables (I guess in case we die), and take us the rest of the way up the mountain to the first cable. Wow! A wooden deck at each end (takeoff via steps, land via ramp) and a steel cable hanging between the two. They comically demonstrated (trying to soothe our nerves I guess), gave us warnings, and said “who’s first?”. The first person was alittle slow to raise their hand, but as soon as the first went, it was all excitement and fun from there (or so Tom says…) The first two were about 350 feet long, one with a waterfall underneath. Everyone started to get the ‘hang of it’ with the excpetion of one person: Pam. Seems she always ended up going across backwards. Sigh.

She says she is trying to steer but learned after the fourth zip (which they tried having her go backwards from the start) that perhaps she was holding on a tad too tight and should relax and let the cables do the work. After learning the other folks were taking bets as to how quickly she would turn around on the zip and travel backwards, she decided to heed the advice of the guide and found it actually worked!

By this time the runs started getting longer and faster as we worked our way back and forth across the valley as it got wider toward the bottom. Eight zips, with the two longest taking nearly 30 seconds to get across! All you had to do was “steer”, that is, try to keep yourself aimed forward so that you could hit the landing ramp running. (If you were out of control, the guide on the receiving end would catch you, but they really didn’t like the probability of injury from flailing elbows, feet, knees, etc.

For the last one, the longest and fastest, they had to catch us, so they said to forget the steering and raise our knees to our chest to get the most speed possible. Wow!

After our return to Lahaina, we joined up with Dave and Linda, who had taken a taxi to Kaanapali Beach Hotel to explore the beach and get some sun. They had had it within about two hours and got back to the hotel shortly after Pam and Tom. From there, we went back to Cheeseburger-In-Paradise for drinks. The drink of the day was a pineapple smoothie complete with rum (way too much rum that day) and lunch. Basically, this was the first time we met our goal of the bar bill being BIGGER than the food bill!

The girls took full advantage of the guys level of drinking and worked us over in one of the many jewelry stores (this is a cruise ship port), each achieving a jewelry purchase of a level relatively rare for either of us.

Last stop of our stay in Lahaina was a restaurant that featured French Cuisine Fine Dining within our Bed and Breakfast, named Gerard’s. The food was excellent, dining on the front porch of the plantation style building we were staying in. Except for some new folks moving in who were loud and obnoxious, the evening was wonderful and we were prepared to move on to the Big Island.

It was the perfect ending to our stay on Maui. Next day, onto the Big Island! Oh and those pineapples we picked at the pineapple plantation….. we still have them….