Staying at Karen's place was great! The place has the feel of a home (versus just a rental space), with a lot of thought and care given to character and charm and detail. It is spacious and open, had plenty of room for 6 of us as well as three additional family members we had with us for a short time. It has a great wrap-around porch and we enjoyed being surrounded by the green wall of mature trees encompassing the home--flowering, fruiting and ornamental. Our kids loved the swing hanging from a big tree behind the house.
The area, near Naalehu and South Point, was calm with great views of the starry sky on cloudless nights. There's a bookstore around the corner, and a great bakery, restaurant, food truck, and farmer's market 5 minutes down the road in Naalehu. There's also a gas station there that has the usual, plus milk, produce and a backroom stocked with goods from Costco. Towards the South Point road, there was a fun farm to tour. The South Point cliffs and the green sand beach (hitch a ride with a local!) were close activities. There is an area of Volcanoes National Park down that way as well, the Kahuku unit, where we had some great hikes with great views. Going the other direction, there's a beautiful ocean overlook, Whittington beach park, Kawa (where we watched surfers and found interesting creatures in tide pools), and Punalu'u black sand beach, where we did some swimming, snorkeling, and turtle watching! Further that direction is Kilauea. We had fun hiking around, seeing the volcano come back to life and fill the crater with a lava lake, and driving along Chain of Craters road down to the ocean, passing lava flows from decades past.
Karen was also a wonderful host. She would leave us avocados on the porch, shared with us fruit from her fruit trees (bananas, oranges, lemons and more), and was fun to talk to, as she has much knowledge about and experience in all things Hawaii. She had some great suggestions for activities and things to do. We had a few things pop up with the house and she was easy to communicate with and addressed everything quickly.
It was a great place, great experience and I would definitely recommend staying there!