Hawaii -- Day 6

On Monday, we decided to do a little more hiking.  The boys wanted to go to Manoa Falls, a trail that climbs up through the rainforest and ends with a waterfall.  Sounded like fun... so I plugged the name into the iPhone and we took off.  Before long, however, we were lost again.  The directions on the phone didn't seem to be anywhere close to where I thought the trail should be on the map.  We drove around for ages, ended up on a scenic outlook that had some cool scenery and some wild chickens, and then found the trail that the phone wanted us to take.  After crossing a stream and hiking along it for a while, it became obvious that it wasn't the right place at all, so we went back to the car.  Roger picked up the phone and decided that I had picked the wrong directions from the options offered and said I was "fired."  So I declared that Mitchell could ride shotgun and take over navigation duties for the day.

The site of a battle in which King Kamehameha drove a bunch of troops over a cliff.

The kids were grossed out by the story, but the scenery was nice.

Wild chickens!

All of the kids swung on this vine that we found on the trail.

Naomi with her walking stick

After the hike attempt, we decided to go up to the Dole Plantation.  This had been on Naomi's list since she had seen it on a TV program about Hawaii a couple of weeks earlier, and heard that it had the world's biggest maze, made out of local plants and in the shape of a giant pineapple.  The idea is to go into the maze with a time-punched card, find eight stations along the way, and then come out again, and compare your time to the leaderboard with the fastest times.  The record for completing the maze is eight minutes.  We did it in just under an hour.  We also stopped in the gift shop and bought some pineapple-related snacks.  Not, however, an actual pineapple-- those were selling for $8 apiece, and we had bought one for $1 at Safeway a couple of nights before.

Kids with their finished card, at the end of the maze

We had no real agenda for the rest of the day, so we just drove around, looking at the side of the island we hadn't seen yet.  Mitchell claimed that he did better at navigating than I did, but of course it's hard to get lost when you don't have a destination in the first place.