We are back in Concord, near the San Francisco bay area, after a fantastic nine day vacation in Honolulu with friends and family.  If your bus has to break down you could do a lot worse than killing time in Waikiki while you await repairs.  Sure, we have already busted our monthly budget, ’cause Hawaii ain’t cheap, but our heads are back on straight and we are better ready to deal with the slings and arrows thrown our way by a 52 year old behemoth.

Last we mentioned, the Bus Nuts forum members had found us a mechanic in Benicia, where we left the bus before departing to Oahu.  David at bay Cities Diesel repaired the power steering leak, and after a few days waiting for an opening drove the bus 90 miles north to the Coach Maintenance Company, in Williams.  Coach Maintenance specializes in old buses, as you can see from the pictures on their site.  We were quite grateful that David took us in on short notice despite his work load, but had we known about Coach Maintenance a few weeks earlier we would have taken Kahuna straight there.  We don’t yet have an estimated date or cost of repair, but things are looking good: as of yesterday Ted reported that he had identified and mostly completed repairs to the transmission. Hopefully the operational and road test after he puts it back together will not reveal additional problems. As to the alternator, David reported that the symptoms were not consistent or even consitently present, so he was not able to devote the time needed to track down the bad component.  Ted said he will take a look but if the symptoms aren’t there he can’t do a lot for it.  We shall see.

Our big decision today was where to have lunch, and since we are in California and have never experienced In-N-Out Burger, the choice was simple.  We are told this will be much much better than our our experiment with Whataburger in Texas.