Lahaina, Hawaii, Continued

As I said earlier, we had all decided to go ashore today, and I'm very glad that we did.
We got in the tender at about 9.30am after a very short wait in line.
The ride over to the pier was smooth and pleasant, unlike the choppy sea horror stories from the day before.
When we got to the pier and first saw Lahaina, it looked beautiful and very like Key West, in the Florida Keys.
The place was a lovely bustling small town with plenty of shops and restaurants etc, nothing like the posts I'd read on cruise critic and similar sites, which all said that there was nothing there.
One of the first things I saw was the Banyan Park, which has the largest Banyan tree in the USA.

The park is quite small but beautiful, with the Banyan tree's branches covering it, giving some much needed shade from the hot sun.
There are also a couple of museums in the town, which we didn't get to see as Maz, Sue and Sheila are not really into that kind of stuff.
We decided to head left along the beach road towards the outlet mall, so the girls could do a bit of shopping.
It was a really lovely walk with shops on the right hand side and for the most part a beautiful sea view on the left.
We arrived at the mall and did our shopping, actually picking up some bargains.
Then we had a coffee in Starbucks which pleased Maz and Sue.
We also decided to stop at the Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurant for lunch on the way back, and had one of the best burgers I've ever had, along with the sea views from our table, it was an excellent meal.
After that we headed back to the tender and as luck would have it, walked straight on to a tender, and straight back to the ship, unlike the later passengers who ended up in a quarter mile queue, waiting to get on the tenders.
So all in all it was a great day out in beautiful Lahaina.Read more