20 Year Trip - Finale
A few candid shots...
Just trying to capture how much fun we were having together. Alone. No interruptions. It was the best!
Have I mentioned our daily exercise routine?
We made sure to take the 5 flights of stairs any time we were coming or going as opposed to the elevator :)
The last day of our trip we decided to visit the Valley of the Temples Memorial Park. This is the Byodo-in Temple. It was established in 1968 to commemorate the first Japanese immigrants to Hawaii. The temple and surroundings were beautiful.
The bell in the Bell House sounds a message of deep calm and peace, cleansing the mind of evil and temptation.
It is customary to ring the bell before one enters the temple to spread the eternal teachings of Buddha. It is also customary to remove your shoes before entering.
We stopped here for one last Shave Ice...
and of course one last sunset...
Special thanks to Siri who got us where we needed to go about 60% of the time. Kevin has a love/hate relationship with her after this trip. One thing Kevin loved to do is say the names of the streets and cities over and over in a real obnoxious voice...Li-ki-li-ki ...Ka-he-ki-li...Hui-Iwa ...over and over and over. And after he'd say the word he'd always follow up with That's fun to say. He promised he'd knock it off as soon as we left Oahu and lucky for him he did :)
Getting to Hawaii was a little rough.
Our time in Hawaii was perfect.
Getting home went similar to getting there.
When we arrived in Vegas we called the place storing our car to let them know we had landed and to come pick us up. As luck would have it their shuttle had just broken down and they said we should take a cab. As luck would have it we only had 20 bucks cash on us (dumb I know, but in our defense we had planned to use our debit card for all our meals but most restaurants we went to only took cash, hadn't planned on that). I didn't want to be without cash for the drive home so we checked with Siri and the storage place wasn't far so we decided to hoof it. Turns out it was a little farther than we thought. By the time we got to the car we were an hour and a half behind schedule. As I type this I'm thinking we could have just used an ATM. I never use the ATM. Didn't even cross my mind til now.
We are still figuring out our Natural Gas car. You really have to plan your gas stops because if you run out you will have to be towed to the nearest NGV station. (Which is why if we were to do it over again we would get a dual fuel vehicle.) Our car can go about 200 miles on the freeway--unless there are hills or you "get a bad fill"--that's NGV lingo. Anyway, we filled up in St George and almost had to Flinstone it into Scipio. We've never drove so many miles with the gas light on. There were quite a few hills to climb between St George and Cedar City along with probably getting a bad fill.
At 3:30am we finally arrived home. That's 11:30pm Hawaii time so it wasn't too bad :)
Such a fun trip with my lover! Happy 20th Kever! Here's to forever together!
