Steve (DOS) and I are currently staying on the island of Maui for 7 nights, returning home on December 14th. It really doesn’t feel like its Christmas here with the warm and beautiful weather (as opposed to the blizzard we experienced on The Big Island), but the Christmas and Hawaiian “Mele Kalikimaka” decorations everywhere remind us that it’s that most wonderful time of the year!
We are staying at a nice condo (1 bedroom/2 bath) in the Wailea area of Maui, which is just up the street from the Waldorf Astoria Maui we stayed at on our last visit a few years back. We really love the Wailea area with its manicured landscaping everywhere, and it’s quaint yet upscale and un-rushed pace.
This condo complex (which is part of Destinations Hawaii group), is now in a partnership with Hyatt Hotels, so that offered us a couple nice perks including Hyatt stay and status credit, concierge services, once weekly housekeeping, and even a late 4pm checkout on our last day, not to mention a huge living room, dining room, kitchen, lanai, and washer and dryer for convenience. The condo really felt like home during our stay!
The condo is in the Wailea area, just up the street from the Wailea Mall and upscale hotels along the beach. The Wailea Mall is definitely an upscale mall with shops such as Gucci, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, and other ridiculously over-priced shops, mixed in with some nice and reasonable souvenir and clothing shops such as the ABC Hawaii store, Honolulu Surf Shop, Whaler’s Market, Tommy Bahama and others.
The outdoor Wailea Mall area is a great gathering place to shop, have morning coffee, lunch, and best of all nice dinners, all near our condo. Day or night, Wailea Mall is the center spoke for the many hotels, golf courses, and restaurants surrounding it in the Wailea area.
Due to COVID, the mall even waived their parking fees, which was nice as we went there everyday for shopping, groceries, lunch, dinner etc, and plus the outdoor area mall was a great place just to walk around or even see free evening entertainment a couple nights a week, such as a luau-type show.
The first night we had dinner at the Waikiki Brewing Company, (located in the Wailea mall complex), which was a friendly and fun place, with several different brews to sample, and good Hawaiian-style pub food as well.
The mall was also a short walk to the beach and oceanfront walkway between the Waldorf, Four Seasons, Marriott Resorts and others as well. We stayed at the Waldorf Maui several years ago, so we knew the area there and expansive grounds and oceanfront trails leading to the other hotels. Here are a few photos taken at the Waldorf Maui, where we had dinner the second night.
The grounds at the Waldorf are huge and expansive, and we loved walking thru them once again on the way to the Huma restaurant where we had dinner the second night. The Waldorf was under major renovation in some areas such as the indoor bar and restaurant area, but the grounds were as magnificent as we remembered from our last visit.
Here’s our some photos of our dinner at the Waldorf Resort’s Humu Restaurant. We had eaten there a couple times several years ago when we stayed at the Waldorf, and it brought back great memories and made new ones for us this trip. “Humu” is actually an abbreviation for the Humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa Restaurant (Humu makes it much easier to say!), and the long version of the word is actually the state fish of Hawaii. We really love the Humu . . . Restaurant, and it reminds us a bit of the Polynesian Resort at Disney World, and the sunset views here are priceless!
and served like a Kabob.
His reply “Your hands of course! You’re in Hawaii!”
I’ll write more later, but just to update our travels, we are in Maui and loving it! Mele Kalikimaka!
