Hey there, it's Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. Oh, my goodness, I just got back from one of the best vacations I've ever had in my whole life, and there's a huge lesson for anyone who does Bright Line Eating¨ embedded in this story. It was with my daughter Zoe. I take each of my three kids on a one-on-one trip each year. I've been doing that for about six or seven years now. There was a point in my motherhood journey where I realized I just wasn't spending enough quality one-on-one time with my kids, and I just didn't know what to do about that. I instituted these mother-daughter one-on-one trips and they've been pretty great. Now, we don't usually do something as extravagant as going to Maui, but we were able to pull this off pretty economically. We paid for the flights with points, we stayed with my dear friend, Dina Love. So, we didn't have accommodation expenses, and we mostly did free stuff while we were there. We just explored nature. We ended up spending six days together, just me and Zoe. She's 16 now. So yeah, me and Zoe together in Maui.
When we were on the plane, planes, multiple planes flying out to Maui, we opened a shared note in our phones and we titled it, "Stuff We Have To Do in Maui," and we just made a checkbox list, like one of those lists where you can just tick it off. Here was our to-do list of things we had to do in Maui. Number one was a sweat lodge. My friend Devin, who lives in Maui, has been doing these sweat lodges lately, and he told me about that, and he said that serendipitously one was going to be happening right as we were there. We wanted to go to that sweat lodge, and we wanted to hike. Zoe's a huge fan of cliff jumping, not a hundred-foot cliffs, but jumping off a cliff into a beautiful pool of water. We wanted to hike, do cliff jumping and see lots of waterfalls. Waterfalls were high on our list. We wanted to drive the road to Hana. This is a winding, narrow kind of harrowing back road that takes hours to drive around the backside of Maui. Hana is this little town of 750 people that's isolated way on the far corner of Maui, and it takes a three-hour winding drive in either direction to get there. It's probably the most remote community of people living in the Hawaiian islands, also with the most expensive gas in the entire United States. By the way, when we got to Hana, we got two gallons of gas just commemorate to take a picture of the $2 for two gallons for $13. It was like $6.70 for a gallon of gas in Hana, so that was kind of funny. On the road to Hana, there are these botanical gardens with these wild peacocks walking around and rainbow eucalyptus trees. So, we wanted to see that. Zoe wanted to pick a bunch of flowers. She's a big nature girl, flower picker, rock collector kind of gal. We wanted to go snorkeling for sure, and we wanted to experience some kind of hot tub or hot springs. We looked into it. Maui doesn't actually have any hot springs, funny enough, but Dina had a little hot tub. She had a Costco hot tub, which we're absolutely in love with. We're like, oh my gosh, this was like 400 bucks. We're going to go buy ourselves a Costco hot tub. So, we're looking into that now that we're home. We wanted to go bathing suit shopping because there's no good bathing suit shopping in Rochester, New York compared to what you can do in Hawaii. So, we wanted to go bathing suit shopping. We wanted to swim with giant turtles in the ocean. They're these huge tortoises that just swim around, and they're pretty friendly. They'll just come right up to you. We did. We found this big tortoise, and the current just pushed him right up against us. We touched him. We didn't mean to, but the waves just swished him right into us, and he was just this big lumbering sweetheart of a guy. Anyway, we swam with giant turtles. We wanted to go to the beach at sunrise, go to the beach at sunset, go to the beach at night with stars, twinkling. We wanted to dig a big hole in the sand at the beach, just like a hole that you could stand in. And gosh, anyway, that was our list pretty much, and we did every last thing on that list, every last thing we got to Hana and we drove all the way around past Hana.
It was remarkable because the road to Hana is famous for being so kind of treacherous. And yet it's interesting that it's actually the road after Hana that's really treacherous. The road narrows even more, and then you realize, oh, at least the road to Hana is paved, like well paved the whole time. The road after Hana is not paved, a lot of it and bumpy, and you got to go really slow and even more narrow, and you're just praying that a car doesn't come in the opposite direction at the wrong time. Oh my gosh. So, we made it all the way around the island. The snorkeling was incredible. The hiking was amazing. The waterfalls were just abundant on the road to Hana. There's waterfall after waterfall after waterfall because on the backside of the island, there are these sort of canyon crevasses that each have a river coming down and a waterfall. There's a pretty high volcano there, I don't know, like 12,000 feet up there, and all jungle on the backside and it's water, it's wet, there's water rushing down, so it's waterfall after waterfall after waterfall. We definitely found our cliff for cliff jumping into beautiful pools, sat in the hot tub on the deck at Hale Akua, which is an eco-garden farm resort on the backside of Maui. They have a hot tub on a deck that overlooks this canyon. Then the ocean behind it with there was a rainbow, of course, just right into the water there. We watched for a long time, and because the sun was moving, the rainbow kept shifting until the rainbow was behind clouds and so beautiful, so beautiful. So, we ticked off all the things.
We had the best time, and here's what we did with our food. We arrived and we went right to the grocery store, and I got all the food that I need to be Bright. I got yogurt for breakfast, chia seeds for breakfast. I got apples and clementines for fruit. I got oatmeal for breakfast, just oats. Dina didn't actually have a microwave. I was like, oh, I use a microwave really heavily in my Bright Line Eating journey, but there was no microwave, so it made me simplify my food even further. I just did overnight oats. I just mixed the oats in with the yogurt and the chia seeds and left it overnight, all weighed out, and it was just there for me in the morning. Just add fruit. My breakfast was already ready. That was super convenient.
I bought frozen peas and corn and green beans, bags of those and bags of frozen shelled edamame. That's just soybeans, frozen in bags already with the shells off. That was protein. I bought cheese. That was a protein, that's all I needed. Then for protein, I was done with proteins, just cheese or edamame for lunch or dinner, yogurt and chia seeds for breakfast. And then I bought raw vegetables. I bought baby carrots and celery and organic yellow peppers, and some beautiful radishes that were grown right on the island, and some organic lettuce that was grown right on the island. A big head of purple cabbage, organic purple cabbage that was grown right on the island and a red onion. Sometimes I would have salads, sometimes I would have just cooked vegetable and raw vegetable, and I packed food the whole time because if you think about it, we were going out into nature. There were like there was going to be no place to eat, no restaurants or whatever. We were hiking and finding waterfalls. And so, I packed my food. I had three pretty decent sized Tupperware containers that I brought from home for my flights out, and I just kept washing and reusing those.
For Zoe, every morning I would wake her up with a massive plate of food, just whole real food, the same kind of stuff I was eating. Some things that I wasn't eating too. We got her some extra stuff at the grocery store, but a big plate of food. She would maw down first thing in the morning, and then we'd have these little clementines, we call them cuties, these little oranges, baby oranges. She would eat those during the day if she got hungry. And then she'd have a big plate of food at night, and I would eat my breakfast, lunch and dinner, and that was it. We ended up at the end of this vacation not having eaten out once. We didn't plan it that way. As a matter of fact, if you'd asked me on the way there, what are the odds you won't eat a single restaurant meal while you're there? I would've said minuscule, minuscule odds. But that's what ended up happening. We stopped at a place called Mama's Fish House, which is this famous restaurant in Paia. But we looked at the menu, and so it was like, I don't understand what this menu is even saying. I don't recognize any of this food, and it was expensive. And I was just like, "We don't have to eat here, sweetie. We have food in the car." She said, "Yeah, let's not eat here." So, we went back to the car, and we just had our same old, same old food, and it was, I think for me, probably one of the most stark examples of keeping my food black and white so I can live my life in vibrant color that I've ever experienced. The way we were able to soak up the soul of Maui, to just be bathed in the love of Mama Maui, to be there with Pele and to swim in the ocean with the fish and the turtles, and jump with the waterfalls into the pools and hike and hike and sweat with the natives in the lodge, and just really, really be there in the land, in the experience of the vacation, and then eat for fuel when it was time to eat. Enjoy the food on the deck, on the lanai overlooking the beautiful water. The weather was gorgeous for us, 78 degrees and sunny every day, 66, 67 degrees at night. So beautiful. And the food was so simple and in its place and fuel and a complement to the amazing times that we were having together on the island. Oh, my goodness.
When people ask me, how could I possibly do Bright Line Eating because I want to go to Italy, or I want to travel or whatever, and how could I possibly forego whatever culinary experiences might be available for me when I travel, I always think about, you know what? There's so much art and architecture and nature and people there to interact with, and our bandwidth is truly limited, right? There's only so much focus we can give to any one thing. And I got to say that this vacation having pretty much a hundred percent focus on the list of things we wanted to do, the incredible being with Maui, being in nature, being together on this adventure that we wanted to accomplish, it was perfect for us to keep food like a 1% share of it, and to have the vacation itself being 99% of what we are up to. So, I just wanted to offer that as a lived experience. Again, it's not virtuous. It's not that we intended it to be this way or that there's anything wrong with eating out when you travel. For goodness sakes, I've eaten out when I travel plenty. But it is a testimony to the reality that if the food stays simple, there's a lot of room for abundant life leftover, and sometimes that can be well worth it. That is my testimony from an epic vacation in Maui, for what it's worth. We were so Bright and had such a beautiful time, and that's the weekly vlog, and I'll see you next week.
