My Pregnancy Journal: Day 13 : Haleakala Crater and dinner

This morning I woke up at 5 a.m. ready to go! Chris…not so much, so I stayed in bed until a little after 5, and then started updating this journal on our trip. We’re staying at a bed and breakfast, and our breakfast was ready at 8 a.m.. We met and chatted with a super nice family from the Baltimore area, and ate a delicious breakfast of fresh fruits, yogurt, cereal, toast, and egg sandwiches. We sat at the table and ate and chat for an entire hour…yummy!!

We headed off to the Haleakala Crater, which goes up to an elevation of above 10,000 feet. The road up the mountain was long, narrow, and windy, and takes a little less than an hour to get from the base to the top.

We stopped on our way up to do one of the overlooks of the crater valley. It was crazy, we were up above the clouds…you could see them rolling in on the base of the crater floor.

It was super windy and this was taken by setting my camera on a timer. Ignore my hair in Chris's eyeball.

Clouds rolling in over crater valley

Chris hiking back in the clouds

After that, we went up to the top and saw the overlook. You can see the Big Island of Hawaii from here, and we could actually even see the snow-capped mountain peak on one of their big mountains over there. The top was really windy. It actually was pretty cold at the peaks of the craters altogether, they say it generally drops 3 degrees for every 1000 feet in elevation, so the top of the mountain is generally 30 + degrees colder than the beaches.

The island in the distance is Hawaii - if you look closely, you can see the snow capped mountain peak!

Crater view from the top

We dressed pretty appropriately in our layers, but saw lots of people in flip flops and tank tops that were shivering. We ate lunch outside of the visitors center, and then headed to the sliding sands trail in the valley of the crater. It was a 5.2 mile round trip hike…downhill the whole first half, and uphill the second half.

The views of the crater and the mountains around there were breath taking. I didn’t expect it to be so pretty.

We hiked down to one of the mini crater peaks in the valley to take a look inside. Chris and I wanted to roll down the crater, but there’s lots of signs and rules on staying on the trail.

We made it back to the base of the mountain by about 5 p.m.. We had planned initially to stay up there for sunset, but we didn’t want to do the windy drive back down to the base in the dark.

We came back, showered, and headed to dinner in the town of Paia. After dinner, we stopped at the Mana Food mart and got some fro-yo Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, which made me really happy. We had attempted to stop by a place and get some crepes, but the wait was too long, and my pregnant body was too tired for that nonsense. Ben and Jerry’s hit the spot!