December 2, 2020

On the Road to Hana More Than Once

By roads-rus

When I saw that a 60 minute drive down the Hana Highway was available on my Peloton, I had to take it for comparison purposes. It was a lot like being on this road in person, which I was when Ruth & I visited Maui a few times before we discovered Kauai and decided we liked it better. The last time we were on Maui was for a birthday celebration, and we drove to Hana and beyond from Pa’ia to Wailua Falls and the Pools of Ohe’o. I won’t do it again.

If you drive the entire Hana road it’s close to 65 miles and several hours. This is about 40 miles too many in my opinion. The Road to Hana is fun at first, but it gets tedious quickly. I can’t believe that someone actually counted the curves. 617. I was expecting them but not all those one way bridges. There are reportedly 56 of them, which is about 50 too many. “Do not pass” signs were a bit more common than “Pass with care” signs, and signs indicating curves with a large S were frequent. Truthfully, I saw few chances to pass another car between Paia and Hana. The hundreds of reactions on the internet to this road ranged from “liked it a lot” to “only threw up a couple of times”.

The Road to Hana was crowded both on the 60 minute bike ride and the actual drive in a car. Most of the people on this road with us were in passenger cars and seemed to make frequent stops to see waterfalls and yet more lush green foliage. There were many places to stop and enjoy this scenic but repetitious natural plenty, which was as ever-present as frequent views of splendid bays. There was also water on the road because this is Hawaii where it often rains at some point during the day. Someone said they enjoyed and appreciated the opportunities to stop for banana bread. Ruth & I didn’t stop for this treat, but we did have lunch in the town of Hana, which isn’t much to see after all the effort to arrive there. I noted a frequency of reddish-orange trees along the road when I biked it but not when I did it in a car. I decided these were African tulip trees that produce beautiful flowers from winter to late spring, and I realized that if these were tulip trees that the Peloton road recorder was there at a fine time of the year.

By all means, take the Road to Hana if you like to drive curvy roads and cross one-lane bridges. For me, I derived much more pleasure from driving to the summit of Haleakala on the same island.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2020 at 10:26 pm and posted in on the road. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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