Spas, Stores and Stars

Aloha,

Tuesday in Maui was pretty relaxing and low key, with us just hanging out locally and not having to drive anywhere.

Cindy's day began after breakfast with her spa day at the Westin Heavenly Spa. After dropping her off, I took some photos of the Westin and along the beach before stopping at Whalers to pick up a few things. My day of relaxing was hanging out at the hotel, shooting video of the sea turtles from our lanai, and working on the website.

When Cindy called me on her way back from the spa, she sounded a lot chipper and energized, so I think the spa treatment is probably something she'll be adding to her regular regime back on the mainland. She was trying to talk me into going next week, but right now, it doesn't look like it's going to happen.

A light lunch was next at the Lagoon Bar, only really consisting of nachos and some pineapple wedges (nice combo, eh?). We didn't stray too far from the beach because we were heading out to Leilani's for dinner, which was around 6:30pm. The sun set while we were waiting for our food, and we got to watch about two dozen people scramble for position along the grass lawn outside of Whalers Village to snap a picture of the sun just over the horizon. We enjoyed it just fine from where we were.

We finished our ono eats at Leilani's a little after 7pm or so, and enjoyed a nice stroll on the beach all the way back to Black Rock. It was nice taking our time and teasing the waves as they ran up the sand. As much as I tried, however, I could not get any good shots of the torches lit on Black Rock with just my camera and no tripod, so that will have to wait for another night this week.

As we were watching the sunset, the clouds started to roll in over Moloka'i and we thought for sure that the stars would not be out to play tonight. Luckily, we were wrong, and they were just as incredible as the night before.

And my luck didn't stop there, as far as the stars were concerned. Not having any success with photographing the stars on Monday, I went back to look at some of the photos I took of the stars last year on my laptop. Man, do I love technology, because all the camera settings that I used to take those photos last year were all saved in the photo files themselves, so I was able to dial in my Canon and point my tripod to the sky once again.

That's where I came out big. I must have gotten over twenty good shots of the stars from all different parts of the sky. Most of them were 30 second exposures, so you can pretty much guess how long I was out there. :) My next task is to try to identify have those stars and constellations after I post them on Flickr and make them available here. That's my kind of homework.

That pretty much wrapped out our Tuesday for this week.