Some photos from Lahaina, Maui, August 2008

I flew from Austin to Maui on August 9, 2008, and stayed in the area of Lahaina that was destroyed by fire on August 8th and 9th this year. I'm posting some photos here that I didn't use in my earlier posts. The first is of the inside of the Lahaina public library, which was next door to the Pioneer Inn (across Papelekane St.), both of which were between Front Street and the harbor/sea wall in the banyan tree area.

The old part of Lahaina was mainly residential and didn't have a lot of  overnight accommodations for the tourists who came to the shops, bars, and restaurants. In fact, the Pioneer Inn, with 34 rooms, was the  only hotel  in that immediate area, which is a designated Historic District. An 18-room B&B called The Plantation Inn also didn't survive the fire, but a large, not-too-fancy hotel nearby called the Lahaina Shores Beach Resort did survive the fire. There are bigger, fancier hotels on other parts of Maui, of course. Here's another Pioneer Inn site: Pioneer Inn History.

This is the old prison wall, just a few blocks away from Front Street, in a residential area:

A non-flash photo of the view outside the windows in the little room I stayed in at the hostel near the prison wall area that my friend Pat Calkins was the manager of during 2008, followed by a skewed-angle photo of the same view, sort of, with one of the Hawaiian shirts Pat gave me hanging next to my little sleeping loft.  The old historic part of Lahaina is (was) not at all upscale. The little bell tower outside the window is (was) on a small Catholic church:

The front (or maybe the back) of the Pioneer Inn, built in 1901. Pat was hired in 1999 by the guy who leased the hotel to help with the restoration of the Inn for the 100th Anniversary in 2001. (The guy had a son who lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where Pat lived prior to 1999. It was through the son that Pat heard about the job to help with the restoration.)

A corner of the Pioneer Inn is visible on the left, and a storefront with upstairs bar/restaurant along Front Street is on the right:

The big banyan tree is in the background with one of its apparent offspring in the foreground. The Pioneer Inn is (was) located on the right of this area. The building behind the tree is (was) the Old Lahaina Courthouse:

Current reports say the 150-year-old banyan tree may have survived the fire, which I guess means its roots may have survived to eventually produce another tree.

Beginning of my journal of the trip. Other journal entries posted Aug. 11, 13, and 15, 2013. (try the Flipcard setting after clicking on blog archive and then 2013).

Photos added Sept 3, 2023:

Another photo I took of the banyan tree,

Van that was parked near where I stayed in Lahaina. People who lived in this area were not wealthy.

Cooking sugar cane in 2008. Steam, not smoke, is coming out of the stacks. The last of the sugar mills closed in 2016.

Maui mountains near Lahaina.

This door led to some of the rooms in the cheaply-constructed hostel-type accommodations I stayed in. Notice there's not a door handle on the door. Typical.

My supermoon photo (not super)

 August 1 supermoon over Auto Zone, to be compared with previous moon over Auto Zone photo. I saw the supermoon rise north of Pine Bluff, with a clear eastern horizon, near the Arkanasas River, and tried to take a photo but without a telephoto lens, so it was just a dot of a moon in an otherwise almost totally black photo. At least the mosquitos had barely even come out at the time, 8:50 pm or so. So I came on back in town and thought about just going back to the same place I took a moon photo the night before, after a friend called  and said I should go out and look at the moon. I wasn't even aware then of the coming supermoon.

Behind me and my truck, visible in the sideview mirror, is Underwater Seafood, a good and fairly new restaurant. This was about 9:10 pm, Auto Zone sign had just been turned off.