Kahului (Maui), Hawaii – February 1

touching baby pineapples - soft, not sharp

Partly cloudy, 28 degrees

A spouting whale welcomed me to Maui! Finally…they weren’t endless, but there were some…I even saw the actual whale this time – I’ve learned to differentiate between a whitecap and the actual whale spout, now I know everything I see isn’t a whale…no

more touching

matter how much I want it to be. At first Chris thought I might have been imaging things because I want to see them so desperately, but nope…eventually he had to agree…WHALES! He’s been known to accuse me of reporting fake news on this blog – no fake news here…WHALES! And as our onboard lecturer says…”this my personal view”

The morning is ours, so we lazed, read the paper and a bit of a book I’m plodding through, blogged, and searched for whales. The ship offered a whale watching tour today, but it was full by the time we booked our

pineapple planters

tours and although on the waiting list we didn’t make the cut.

We are in Hawaii after all, so it seems about right that we learn something about Hawaii’s state fruit – the pineapple. OK, so maybe describing the pineapple as Hawaii’s state fruit is fake news, but they’re all over the place here and apparently one whole island used to be exclusively for pineapples. And

all you can eat pineapple

they aren’t even native…pineapples came to Hawaii from South America in the early 1800s

The plantation was a short ride from our boat. Maui Gold is Hawaii’s only remaining pineapple plantation. It was a very agricultural place, as would be expected. The pineapples and planted and harvested by hand. A total of 50 people work here, with the average ages of the planters/harvesters being 68! It takes 15-18 to grow a pineapple.

We sampled the pineapples and they were pretty awesome. We’ve had pineapple on the boat most days, but those have been a bit disappointing…hard and not sweet enough – these fruits are sweet and tender. We stood on one of the plantation dirt roads,

surrounded by row upon row of pineapple while our guide sliced off the peel with a giant knife…then we ate and ate, until we could eat no more.

Our visit ended with a brief tour of the

packing facility and then we were back to the ship. They also make pineapple vodka, wine and beer – not sure why we didn’t have a chance to sample that. The sample room/lovely outdoor area was ready for visitors, but nope. This could have been the requisite shopping stop. As I said, the place was pretty simple…no gift shop, barely a bathroom.

glorious

We got quite a bit of rain while we were there, but none really when we were in the fields. A beautiful rainbow sent us on our way back to the ship.