Retiree News

Hawaii Air National Guard retiree Douglas Awana and his wife, Diane are on a 2-3 year RV road trip of the continental 49 states. One of the goals of their once-in-a-lifetime trip is to visit as many HIANG retirees as possible.

Doug just emailed Retiree News about his visit with Gerald Lum, another HIANG retiree.

As we begin our 3rd year of RVing the Continental 49 we finally met-up with our second HIANG connection (the first was JC back in June 2020). Not sure if you know/remember Gerard Lum. He was a technician in Egress shop back in the CAMRON days when Craig Harimoto was the shop chief. He transferred from the HIANG to the North Carolina ANG in 1995 after meeting his future wife, Catherine, at McGhee Tyson NCO Academy. He retired militarily from the Guard and now works for “NetApp”, a data storage company where he is a Support Account Manager. His primary customer base is the US Air Force and Space Force. His area of responsibility stretches from Qatar to South Korea and every base, program and weapons system in-between. Gerard and Catherine have two daughters (both in their 20’s) and live near Raleigh, North Carolina. 

We met with Gerard and Catherine for dinner last night. Seated at the table in the attached group photo is: Gerard, Catherine, Nan (my 90 year old mother-in-law), Diane, and myself. [sidebar: we bring my mother-in-law up to join us for 6-8 weeks at a time. Usually every 3-4 months, depending on where we are) so that Diane can spend time with her mom. Truly a blessing to see mom and daughter enjoying each others time together.]

As for Diane and I we are in our 26th month (of our projected 45 month) of RVing and loving every mile of it. We just finished “wintering” in Florida, our 36th state. We are currently headed up the east coast to visit the 7 remaining states that we haven’t visited yet (see attached map). From there we head to Isle Royale National Park (couldn’t get a reservation last year) in the Upper Peninsula before heading to Colorado. While we had hoped to get together with more of our HIANG ohana, finding them has been a challenge. Seems that most are in Nevada (Vegas, Reno) which we won’t get to until 2023, or our route does not bring us close to them. Oh well, we take what God gives us and continue to keep an eye out for future opportunities.

What a life adventure!