Finally the day for the 60 minute complete Island tour with Blue Hawaiian Helicopters arrived. We were so happy to see clear skies over most of the island when we went outside.

Of course we were early so we drove around Kahului a bit before we decided that was a crazy thing to do with all the traffic around so we headed to the heliport.

A while after we checked in, we were called to the pre-flight briefing area where we met the other 3 people (a family from Chicago who were happy to be out of the cold weather) who would be on the same flight. The briefing was straight forward and didn’t make me nervous (or at least any more than I already was). This was my first ‘real’ helicopter flight – at the Great Barrier Reef we were only in the air for about 10 minutes.

Soon we were called and placed in a line in the order we would board the helicopter. I was first *gulp* and John was after me. Was I surprised to find that being first put me in the centre of the front seat, right between the pilot and John. Other than the fear of touching some of the controls while we were in the air, I was happy with our seating.  John had booked the tour on one of the helicopters with the big windows so we had an awesome view.

Our flight took us over a lot of the areas that we had seen from the ground – the Haleakala crater, the road to Hana and the west side of the island which, unfortunately, was cloudy so we didn’t get to see the waterfalls there (maybe next trip to Maui  *g*). We did fly over the ocean looking for whales and we saw a mother, calf and her escort. Pretty cool!

It didn’t seem like an hour when we headed back to the heliport. Once there, we were offered a chance to buy a copy of our flight and we couldn’t resist. It will be mailed to us and will be a great memory of a wonderful tour.

After we changed out of our dark clothes, we drove to Lahaina to look for a carving made of a local wood called Milo. Unfortunately, all the things we really liked were bigger than we wanted.  Oh well, 2 more days to look.

Tonight there was a BBQ at the resort’s clubhouse, complete with a hula demonstration.

Have I mentioned that there is a mynah bird that likes to imitate car alarms?  Made us jump the first time – now we just laugh and hope it’s not really our car making noise.

Oh and last night there was a pretty nice sunset, without too much cloud. We walked down to the beach and sat on some rocks while waiting for the show to start. On the way there, we saw a dog wearing doggy sunglasses and he didn’t mind!