Wow, it feels so surreal to actually be here after a year’s worth of planning. We are definitely a little shell-shocked by it all. I don’t think either one of us expected to feel so homesick on our first day but we both felt it pretty hard. Any move makes you feel displaced for a while so all it will take is a little time for Maui to feel like home.

The day we landed was a whirlwind. We were picked up from the airport by the local car rental company and driven into Kihei to pick up our sweet 2003 Nissan Sentra. It was our first chance to get a glance at the area we were planning on living in… more on that later. Our car is what locals refer to as a “cruiser” but you might know it by it’s mainland name “piece of crap.” When the rental agent took a walk around the car with me to go over the existing damage he said something like “as you can see, this is a terrible car.” His little drawing of the car with circles indicating damage was comical. There is a scratch, ding and missing paint literally every inch. It’s perfect and we love it!

We got the car and drove up into the Maui mountains to our house. Wow, these mountains are MUCH bigger than we expected. Our house for the next month is a typical Maui house for this price range and has 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, a living room and a kitchen. It has an incredible view of the Central Valley and the ocean from the Lanai. Every morning we are woken up by a beautiful sunrise and a chorus of frogs. I’ll put some photos of the house up soon.

After getting settled in at the house, we drove to the downtown area of our town, Wailuku, deposited our rent check and had lunch at the coffee and sandwich shop the people we are subletting from own. After that we took a drive around the island to check out some potential areas to live. Thanks to all the research we have done, there weren’t too many surprises, however we did discover two areas we really like called Maui Meadows and Wailea. They are near Kihei on the southern part of the Island where some of the best beaches are. Affordable housing is not all that easy to find in these neighborhoods but we looked at a couple and one feels very promising.

Anyway, after driving around for a couple hours we went to Kmart and Costco to get some stuff. Surprisingly, many of the prices were actually better than in Chicago. It felt strange to be doing routine shopping in Hawaii, it made us feel local.

Today is all about finding an apartment. I think we will be OK but apartment hunting is always a stressful event.