I know I pretty much summed up the second half of our Hawaii trip in my last post, but there’s something big I left out (on purpose). Really big. On our last full day in Maui, Karen and I drove the road to Hana, which is full of beautiful places to stop… waterfalls, scenic overlooks, beaches, you name it. It was overcast and rainy most of the day, but it didn’t really put a damper on our moods. We were just enjoying the drive. However, I was on alert for a good place to stop… to do something important. Finally, the rain seemed to lighten up and I saw signs for Nahiku road, which dropped you off right on the water, where waves crashed on the coastline, and tropical woods backed up to the water. We drove to the end of the road and then hiked a tiny distance to a rocky alcove that was very secluded and overlooked both the ocean and a small pool within the rocks. It was here that I proposed, and asked Karen to be my wife. She was completely surprised, overwhelmed and in tears, but her answer was an absolute YES. 🙂 Just moments later, the sun broke out of the clouds, and for the first time all day, we had sunlight. (Of course I commented on how expensive this was to arrange!)  I purposely left this out of my last blog post because it had JUST happened and we wanted to tell close friends and family before it became “public” on the blog.

Our friend Beverly got this iPhone shot of me and Karen the night before I proposed.

After the Hawaii trip came to a close, we flew back to Las Vegas, where the bus was parked. On our first night back, Our great friends Sean and Louise came out for a cocktail with us to celebrate the engagement and then we all went to dinner. (We just got back after two weeks of being away, so our fridge was EMPTY!) We also got to be there for my friend Steve’s birthday and we had a nice little party for him. From this point on… much of the week has been dedicated to the bus. I mentioned before that the bus has been having issues with the generator, and Sean has helped a great deal with the troubleshooting. We reached a point, however, where the generator MUST be looked at in a shop. I wont go into details, but it’s not looking good, and if we ever want to be able to boondock again on this bus, we have to do something about it. The other bus issue that needs attention is the batteries. The batteries on this bus are very old and beyond ready to be replaced. There’s a good chance that might happen in the next week. But mix together the problem with the generator and the old, struggling batteries, and we have a bus that pretty much NEEDS to be plugged in to a big outlet. This is far from ideal when we want to be exploring places outside of an RV park. Luckily, Sean and Louise are more than gracious and have allowed us to plug into to their battery bank so that we can keep basic things running while in a boondocking situation. The bus will be worked on today and we’ll hopefully get some idea as to what it will take to repair the generator. If that gets done, and I replace the old batteries, we’ll be two steps closer to being somewhat self-sufficient.