Tag Archives: Retirement

Hawaii!

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Roxie has wanted to go to Hawaii for many years and was trying to coordinate her side of the family going also. I finally told her we should just schedule a time and they could then have a target to shoot for.  We chose a time that covered Roxie’s birthday, our granddaughter’s birthday and our anniversary, it was also pretty close to my birthday.  We also decided to take our granddaughter with us.  Unfortunately, it was not conducive to take the Airstream.

We scheduled 5 nights on Maui.  After a very cramped airline flight, we arrived in humid Maui.  Here is the view from our hotel room near Lahaina.

On our second day, it was Paige’s (granddaughter) birthday so we surprised her with a Zipline tour.  She and I both went on the lines.  We had a good time but I got stuck on one of them.  I came in very fast, even after following the hand directions, I hit the limit of the line, smacked the springs and shot back down the line.  Stuck in the middle over a canyon.  It was not traumatic, I just worried about taking up time from the others.  Here we are on top of a hill:

Another ‘Hawaiian’ tourist thing to do is go to a luau, which we did also:

One day we drove the road to Hana.  We got a photo by a grove of bamboo:

We had the same airline flight back, Roxie wants to go first class next time!  Our son picked up Paige from SFO as she had high school orientation the next day!  We stayed to visit our other grandchild (Atlas) for a few days.

We had a good time in Hawaii and will go back sometime to a different island.  I think we would like to avoid August as it was very humid and our last day was somewhat impacted by a tropical storm to the south of the big island.

 

Final leg(s)

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We left Fernley NV and did a short trip down the road, through Sparks and Reno to Verdi.  We have stayed in this town before but we stayed at the KOA.  This time we stayed at the Gold Ranch RV park.  It was a nice stay.  We took advantage of a larger town to take care of some things.  We went to a Scheel’s department store, largest in the country, and looked at their sporting goods.  It was HUGE!  We also went to a few movies while there.  Here is a picture for George, a fake moose at Scheels:

Upon leaving the store it became interesting.  I was waiting outside under their overhang area and there was an Airstream parked there.  Same size as ours (sort of, it was a 30).  While I was standing there waiting to talk to the owners some lady, about 10 feet from me, tripped on the curb, fell down and severely injured her shoulder.  I saw her going down but could not do anything to stop it.  The staff called 911 and an ambulance was on the way, all was being taken care of.  I was able to talk a bit to the owners.  What piqued my interest was they had a bike rack that was above the propane tanks.  I took some pictures and asked a few questions:

Might be something I have to look at…

Another thing we did while in the Reno area was pop in on an old friend from high school, Ray Siner:

He is one of the chefs at a local Mexican restaurant, where we ended up having lunch also.  It was so much fun to visit with Ray whom I last saw at our 10-year reunion (30 years prior)!  I think this is a new thing I am going to try to do when traveling around, visiting old classmates.  So if you are an old classmate and are reading this, let me know where you are!

It was pretty hot during our visit but the city of Sparks has a nice little lake and we thought we would try out our kayaks.  It was even hotter on the water!

After our last night in Reno, we headed closer to Visalia.  We headed south down 395 toward Bridgeport.  It was hot when we left but by the time we had got to Bridgeport for dinner, we had been through some heavy rain and a small bit of snow!  What a difference.  The night at Willow Springs RV park was so wonderful and cool.

The next day was cool to start and we had a date with Tioga Pass and the Airstream.  We usually head east through the pass so we are going downhill.  This westbound trip had us climbing the pass but at least, for Roxie, we were on the hillside of the road.  The truck did very well climbing to the 9900’+ elevation with one exception of a slow car that eventually pulled over.

We stopped at the Olmstead Point lookout to get a selfie of us and the backside of Half Dome:

This was due to the fire going on in Yosemite and 41 south was closed a couple of days after we went through it.

We made it back to our son’s house to get ready for our next trip, without the trailer.