2012 Trip to California / Hawaii

We left in our Roadtrek on our grand adventure at the end of April. Following the path of Route 66 for much of the way, we admired the changing countryside as we drove through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and finally California. We camped every night at private campgrounds. It was so nice to get back into travel mode. While camped at the KOA in Flagstaff, AZ, our inverter started giving off a burnt smell and began smoking. We needed a working inverter to be able to run our standard "dorm room" refrigerator (which incidentally worked great the entire trip - see Economy Refrigerator ). As luck would have it, there was an inverter store less than 2 miles from our campground. Northern Arizona Wind and Sun sold us a very nice 1000 Watt sine-wave replacement inverter. I removed our old inverter and installed the replacement while parked at a Home Depot, which gave us an easy source for tools and parts,

In California, we drove directly to the Los Angeles cruise port where we parked the Roadtrek and boarded the Disney Wonder for a 15 day cruise to Hawaii. It was a wonderful cruise with stops at the islands of Hawaii, Maui, Oahu, and Kauai. We saw many great sites including the Keck Observatory on the top of Mauna Kea, Haleakala National Park, the Alii Kula Lavender Farm, Arizona Memorial, Battleship Missouri, and a great hike through the rain forest to see the waterfalls on Mt. Wai' ale' ale. After sailing back to Los Angeles, we drove to Disneyland, where we stayed in the Disneyland Hotel for one week. It was fun seeing Disneyland and California Adventure again and the week went way too fast. Bidding farewell to Mickey, we drove our Roadtrek over to Sequoia National Park and ogled the massive trees We then visited Yosemite before making our way back over to Napa and Sonoma valleys for wine tasting. We also recommend stopping at Petaluma, a great small town.

We began our trek back east driving briefly through Reno, NV before seeing the Bonneville Salt Flats and the Great Salt Lake. After a night in Provo, we decided to go visit Arches National Park, which was fantastic as usual. We also made our first visit to Canyonlands National Park and wonder why we didn't visit this awesome park before. We then gradually made our way to Ames, Iowa for a family visit. We made it back home to Ohio on June 4th, about 1 1/2 months and 6000 land miles after starting our great adventure. The Roadtrek held up fine, with no problems other than the inverter. I think we are some of the few people who have traveled from Ohio to Hawaii without getting on an airplane.