It wasn’t until seven months later that the service actually went online for the Aloha State, and I can only imagine it’s been getting better ever since.

Fast Forward

Fast forward to last night, when I was looking at the Daily Maui Photo for Saturday, which is an aerial shot of the Iao Valley State Park I took during the Maui Photo Festival that year. The aerial shot led me to drill into the satellite imagery on Google Maps to find out how far we had hiked when I took my Iao Valley Stream photo on our previous trip.

In the process of viewing the satellite imagery on Google Maps, the little Street View guy was there staring at me, so I said what the heck and gave it a shot. And here’s what I found.

View Larger Map

Pretty cool, if you ask me. Now, the next time someone asks me on Twitter at @DailyMauiPhoto about any of my Iao Valley photos, I can point them to here as well. People can actually “drive” up to the parking lot of the state park without having to leave their living room (or if their on vacation, their hotel room).

And aside from the cool factor, it looks like they Street View team had much better weather than we did when we were last at the Iao Valley State Park. Here’s my closest shot to the view above from that trip:

The blue skies from the Google car make for a much better image, don’t you think? Not bad for a series of cameras bolted onto the roof of car, if you ask me.

Where Else Has Google Been?

I haven’t made it a point yet to check out other popular – or lesser known – spots on the island to see what Google has covered yet, but I’ll try to make a point to, soon. If you do give it and find something good, please share in the comments as I’d love to check it out.

- Kris

Each area map features beaches, restaurants, and sights that we’ve enjoyed in that particular area, and as we build it out more, each location will also feature links to photo galleries, videos, blog posts, and external websites related to that activity.

So, if you’re not yet familiar with the island or just want to know more about a particular part of it, go ahead and check it out here. We’re still looking to add more details, but if you have as suggestion or comment, please help us improve.

Mahalo.

Our trip this year was the first time we headed down to the beaches down in South Maui, as we wrote about in our beach hopping post. We also added more details from the places we stopped at along the Road to Hana, including more coverage of the black sand beach at Waianapanapa State Park and our first encounter with the red sand variety, Koki Beach near Hana.

Each beach includes an overview and highlights, photos we’ve taken of each beach, a few links here and there, and aerial satellite views courtesy of Google Maps. We’re always finding great new links and articles about these beaches, so we try to keep them current. We also have a few videos of some of these beaches that we hope to have added soon.

So check out the Beaches section and see if your favorite beach is listed. If it is, let us know about it and tell us why you love it. If you don’t see your favorite, let us know!!! We’re always looking for ideas and places to visit on our future trips.

Mahalo.

Beaches
As mentioned awhile back, Google Maps was recently updated with new satellite imagery in the Ka’anapali area and in other parts of West Maui. Looking for ways to share this new aerial beauty relatively easily, I was inspired to use this new imagery as a different art form to showcase some of the beauty of Maui’s beaches.

What you’re find on the various beach pages, such as Ka’anapali Beach here, is a full bird’s eye view of each beach zoomed in to the best range to fit the page layout. From here, you can see from up above what Maui visitors see from the sandy shores, and gain a better appreciation for the true beauty of these popular spots.

Restaurants
For the restaurant side of things, I was also inspired to add a little functionality with Google Maps. This particular inspiration came from a local portal site near home that I stumbled across while searching for a Chinese restaurant (I can’t remember the particular site at the moment). Among all the basics, it featured a little map inlet that showed about a 2-3 block radius of where the restaurant was located. I thought it’d be easy for the Maui restaurants featured here.

So that’s what I did, and actually took it a step further by adding two map inlets. The first follows the original idea, having a 2-3 block radius around the restaurant location, just to get your bearings. The second map is more of an island-level view to get a better idea of what part of Maui the restaurant is located.

To get a better idea of what it looks like, check out the Cheeseburger in Paradise page in the restaurants section, which happens to be the first restaurant we stop at for dinner when we visit Maui.

This little creation allows you to enter a location (zip code or city and state) in the US and it will map out how far away you are from Maui. You can also see other recent searches from other visitors, so you can see where you rank if your not one of the lucky ones already living on Maui. It uses data from the geocoder.us website, which is based on the US Census data and the reason why it’s restricted to only locations in the US at the present time.

It was a fun little mini-project to put together, and hopefully can add a few minutes of fun to your day. I’ve also thought of adding the capability to generate and host little HTML badges that you can copy onto your own site, blog, or whatever. I’m sorta waiting to see what type of response or feedback I’d get here from that idea to see if there’d be any takers prior to spending time on it.

I do have other Google Map related projects that I’m working on for the site as well, so be sure to check back soon.

Mahalo.

But rejoice, because today I noticed that Google has updated some of their imagery and it’s looking much better than it was before. Here’s a shot of Ka’anapali Beach near the Sheraton.

View Larger Map

There are still a few places like Hana that look very poor, but we can only assume that Google is getting to that, too.