xmas day
We hadn't really counted on everything being closed today, so our brief visits to Pai'a, Makawao and Kula were a bit dull. Since we were in the area though, we decided to head up to the Haleakala crater. After a whole lot of switchbacks, but hardly any traffic, our Cobalt made it to the visitor center. We were able to use our National Parks pass again to get in, and tried to figure out how much money it has saved us over the last year but could only really be sure of around $60 or so. We'll definitely be buying another one in January! When we got to the top 
we saw that a few truckloads of horses had been driven up, but we weren't able to get past them in time, and ended up inhaling a pungent mixture of volcanic dust and horse turds as we walked down the Sliding Sands trail behind them. At least it made for some nice pictures
We walked about 3/4 of a mile down the trail, then turned around since we were starting to get hungry. After a brief stop at the true summit (10029 ft) 
where we ran into some guys who were about to mountain bike down from Ulaula overlook, we headed back down the mountain. Unfortunately, the place thaat we wanted to eat at for lunch (Ichiban something or other) was closed, and the only place that we could find that was still open was a kind of nasty Chinese restaurant. By that point though we were much to hungry to care. I had forgotten to charge the GPS, so we were also a bit lost for a large part of the day.
The GPS -- a Garmin Nuvi given to us by my parents -- is really a fantastic tool for anyone who travels. It makes finding places very easy of course, but the interface is really a joy to use, and it has a lot of very useful extra features... for example, it can tell you where the nearest gas station/restaurant/hotel/interesting place is, it has a multilingual phrase book, a currency and unit converter and on and on. I'm really looking forward to using it on our next road trip.
Dave and Sandy had invited us over for Christmas dinner with Daves family, which was really nice, and something I hadn't really thought of when we booked this vacation. I didn't grow up in a religious family, and it's maybe a little strange that a jewish/japanese family makes a christmas dinner, but we would have missed it! It was great, and Chloe and I were both really thankful that they had invited us.
