Vacationing on vacation

Ted and I wanted to take the excursion to Lahaina (the city of royalty) today, but the ticket agent told us she’d sold the last two tickets just five minutes before we came to her desk.  We took that to be a sign that we should have a vacation day today, so we spent the day relaxing.  Lahaina translates to “hot sun” because it is always very hot there.  We stayed cool(er) instead.

We took some time to explore the ship and found out there is an “upscale” restaurant upstairs from the restaurant where we ate dinner last night.  The stairway to the upstairs restaurant is inside the downstairs restaurant, so you have to enter one to get to the other.  The downstairs restaurant is casual and allows shorts; the upstairs restaurant requires trousers and button-down shirts for men and dresses for women.  The dress code upstairs doesn’t seem to be enforced, because we saw men eating in shorts and women wearing jeans.  The most surprising thing was that the menu in both restaurants is exactly the same!  We even recognized some of the staff from the downstairs restaurant working in the upstairs one.  I don’t get the “upscale” part about wearing different clothes to eat the same food served by the same people.

The ship’s dock site was a five-minute walk from downtown Kahului, so we walked to the mall for lunch and checked out the area a little bit.  Then it was back to relaxing poolside.  We enjoyed live music, beverages, and ice cream, and had a pleasant afternoon in the warm Maui sunshine.

Here’s the main pool area on the ship.

The band and singer are onstage at the left.  The arrow shows where Ted is taking it easy today.  The empty chair at his side is mine.

We were told it was a good day because the clouds lifted enough to see Mt. Pu’u Kukui, one of Maui’s volcanoes.