The Whales Come Back Before the Crowds Do The humpbacks are on their way back. Almost everybody waits until February to come and see them.

A meteor shower peaked over the island in the small hours of this morning. Here is how to be awake for the next one.

Four trails, one close to each of our neighborhoods, and the reason to be at the trailhead early. The best hour of a Maui day is the one most visitors sleep through.

When Something Breaks Things break in every home, including the one you rented for a month. Here is what happens next.

Four days, October 1 to 4, at the War Memorial Special Events Complex in Wailuku. It is the ninety-ninth, and last year more than a hundred thousand people came through the gates, on an island of about a hundred and sixty thousand residents.

Almost everybody books seven nights. Not because they worked it out, but because a week is the unit people think in. Seven nights is what a holiday is, so seven nights is what goes in the booking form. Then a strange thing happens, which we hear about constantly. Somewhere around day five, people start saying the same sentence to each other on the lanai. *We should have come for two weeks.*

The Car Question Most people get this wrong in one of two expensive directions. Here is the real answer.

The Side of the Island Nobody Sleeps On Twenty-five minutes uphill from the beach, the whole island changes temperature and character.

People plan the middle of a Maui trip in detail and leave the first day entirely to chance.

Nobody flies to Hawaii in September. That is not a complaint. It is the entire reason to come.

South Maui Fish Company sits in the Aloha Open Marketplace on South Kihei Road. Family run, fish off Maui boats, and they will cut and clean fillets for you while you wait.

A place you can walk to the market from is a place you live. A place you have to drive to a resort restaurant from is a place you are visiting.

The Last Good Week Everybody ends summer in the middle of August. The island doesn't.

Getting to Maui takes a day. Actually arriving takes two more. Here's how to spend them.

Everybody talks about the sunset. Almost nobody talks about the two hours after it, which are the best part of the day.

Not all waves are equal for learning, and the summer south shore has the combination that matters.

For the three or four weeks of peak mango season, which runs through July and into August, the fruit is everywhere. It's in the farm stands. It's in the Saturday markets. It's on the counter at the coffee shop. It's in a cooler at the end of a road in Haiku with a hand-painted sign and an honesty box. It's the thing the whole island is quietly excited about, and it's the thing almost no visitor plans around, because nobody flies to Hawaii for the fruit.

There's a version of summer on Maui that most people never see, because they book the wrong three weeks.

There's a reason the locals built their days around this hour, and it's not because they're lazy. It's because Maui in the middle of the afternoon is genuinely the hardest part of the day to be active.

If you actually want to give him something this year, give him the trip he wouldn't book for himself.