For our trip to Maui, we had originally planned to rent a condo, but after a frustrating search, were never able to find what we were looking for. So instead, we settled on staying at the Makena Beach and Golf Resort, on Mekena Beach, south of Wailea.
A rough map of the area where we were staying. Wailea is marked with, with our resorted noted just south as 'Makena Golf Course'.
Wailea is the ritzy part of Maui, with the high end resorts (Four Seasons, Fairmont) located here. This area is supposed to be the sunniest and driest part of Maui, and that worked out in our favour as the first couple of days, you could see massive black clouds over the north part of the island, while we were sitting on the beach in the sun. Apparently the area around he airport got dumped on while we were there, with flash flood warnings and flooding around the airport. We were dry. :-)
One of the outrigger canoes on the property.
One of the attractions of the hotel was the gold course, which I played one day over the week. It's a beautiful course, and I'll throw up some pics on a separate post. On the grounds of the hotel, they had a few interesting little features that we took advantage of. There was a large, open space that on Monday nights they do stargazing with a local astronomer. Sadly, on the Monday we were there it totally clouded over, so we couldn't see anything. Also right there was a croquet lawn (we didn't manage to try), and a real, nine hole miniature golf layout. Real, maintained putting greens, one of which was literally impossible. Justine showed some promise, making two hole-in-ones.
The croquet lawn.
A proper nine hole mini golf layout.
One of the more stright-forward holes on the course.
The easy first hole.
The resort is located on Makena beach, which is one of the nicest beaches on Maui. We had visited the beach last trip, to watch the sunset. The views around the resort of the beach were great. The sand was really nice, the snorkelling was probably the best we had anywhere on the island, and it was right outside our front door. The other great thing was that there seemed to be a lot of whales, quite close to shore. We saw blow spouts everyday (from our patio in our room and from the beach), and even saw a few breaches while sitting on the beach.
Whale blow spouts from the lanai of our room at Makena Beach.
The view down Makena Beach of the awesome houses that share the area.
One of the only negatives about the trip was that we didn't get many nice sunsets. On our last trip we had come to Makena on one random night, and experienced a fabulous sunset. Over the course of the week, we only had one night that really offered anything nice. Most nights the colour just faded out to nothing.
They do a great job with the landscaping around the resort - lots of great trees and flowers, and a few artifical waterfalls and the like. And a really big koi pond. I'll do a separate post for the flora and fauna.
A little waterfall in the resort.
A view of the hotel from the water. Our room was to the left on the building (from this angle).
A view of the hotel, coming back from snorkelling.
The view from our lanai, looking out over the ocean and towards the north end of Maui.
If we leaned over the edge of our balcony, we could see out to Molokini.