The Original Bachelor

By Eric Bohling

On March 25, 2002, The TV show The Bachelor aired for the first time on television. On March 25, 1995, seven years prior to the airing of The Bachelor, the original bachelor, a farmer from southeast Nebraska in a small town called Auburn, married a beautiful girl from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Before there was ever a Bachelor TV show, this farmer had a life-changing real-life experience that is very similar to The Bachelor. This book will make you feel good again about love, marriage, and living the good life. This is a true story of how a farmer had a wild thought come into his mind and changed it into a big decision that would affect him for the rest of his life. This farmer took a big chance in life, and it paid off with big dividends. If you like romance, happy endings, good stories, have a good sense of humor, and want to know that there is hope out there for you, then you must read this book! This book will make you feel good about life again. This book will capture your attention because it is a story of many twists and turns with life lessons that are of value to everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781662414336

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The Original Bachelor

Eric Bohling

Copyright © 2020 Eric Bohling

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-6624-1432-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-1433-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Reflecting Back on My Youth

Growing Up

Arriving in Honduras

How Did I Get to This Point?

The Taxi Ride

Hotel Plaza

The Girl in the Black Dress

Danli

Going Home

Life Changes

The Second Trip to Honduras

The Beginning of Our Life Together

The Wedding

Life after the Wedding

Hurricane Mitch

The House with Many Memories

Harvest of Faith

An Unfortunate Event

Loli’s Surprise

Forgiveness

The Cattle Business

The Prodigal Son

The Twins

My Purpose

I would like to dedicate this book to my wife, Loli. Thank you for supporting me the last twenty-five years and being such a great wife and mother to our kids.

Introduction

On March 25, 2002, The TV show The Bachelor aired for the first time on television. On March 25, 1995, seven years prior to the airing of The Bachelor, the original bachelor, a farmer from southeast Nebraska in a small town called Auburn, married a beautiful girl from Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Before there was ever a Bachelor TV show, this farmer had a life-changing real-life experience that is very similar to The Bachelor. This book will make you feel good again about love, marriage, and living the good life. This is a true story of how a farmer had a wild thought come into his mind and changed it into a big decision that would affect him for the rest of his life. This farmer took a big chance in life, and it paid off with big dividends. If you like romance, happy endings, good stories, have a good sense of humor, and want to know that there is hope out there for you, then you must read this book! This book will make you feel good about life again. This book will capture your attention because it is a story of many twists and turns with life lessons that are of value to everyone.

Chapter 1

Reflecting Back on My Youth

Attention, passengers, this is your pilot speaking. You can go ahead and unfasten your seat belts. We will be landing in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, at approximately 1:05 p.m. After hearing this, I leaned back in my seat and relaxed. This was in the middle of June 1994.

As I was sitting back in my seat, I started reflecting back on my life. In the middle of June of 1968, I was sound asleep and awoke at 6:00 a.m. I heard my dad’s 3020 tractor running outside. I jumped out of bed and ran to the window. I saw my dad hooking up the John Deere sickle mower. I threw my clothes on as fast I could and ran down the stairs. I asked my mom if I could go with my dad to cut hay.

She said, Eric, you are too little to ride the tractor.

I responded and said, Mom, please! I had done it before!

She finally gave in and let me go. I hurried outside and hopped on the tractor with my dad. We went to cut hay. After riding on the tractor with my dad for a while, I asked him if he would let me drive the tractor. He said, Son, you are too little. I ended up talking him into letting me drive the tractor. As we were driving along and cutting hay, our family dog was following us behind. All of a sudden, a pheasant flew up out of the alfalfa, and the dog jumped over the mower to try to catch the pheasant. I accidentally cut the dog’s legs off. My dad told me it was time for me to go home, and he would take care of the dog. I knew right away what he would have to do to the dog, and I did not want to think about it. I hurt for a long time afterward about that accident. Reflecting back, it was just one of the many incidents that would prepare me for the life I had ahead of me. Life has many ups and downs, but God can use these to build our character. At the age of eight years old, I knew that I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up. But more than being a farmer, I wanted to be a cattle feeder.

Sir, would you like something to drink? I looked up and told the flight attendant I would like a Coca-Cola. She poured me my drink and asked what I was going to Honduras for. I looked back at her as straight-faced as I could be and told her that I was going to find myself a wife in Honduras. She got really quiet and had a big smile on her face. She then asked, Are you serious?

I turned around and said, I know it sounds crazy, but I am really going for this reason.

She moved to the next row of seats and asked the people in those rows what they wanted to drink. Five minutes later, she looked back at me and said, Sir, I hope you find a nice girl in Honduras.

I thought to myself, I must be crazy.

My mind went wandering off again. I started thinking about my mom and dad. My dad’s brother was seven years older than my dad. My mom’s dad had a threshing machine; this was before combines were invented. The threshing machine was used to separate the wheat from the straw and the chaff. Back in those days, neighbors would work together a lot. My uncle would go to my grandpa’s house to grease the threshing machine. All the neighbors would thresh wheat together. That was when my uncle met my aunt, my mom’s sister. My dad started going along with my uncle and met my mom. So my dad and his brother ended up marrying sisters. They grew up a mile and a half apart. My mom and dad were both very hard workers. My dad grew up picking corn by hand. He could pick two wagonloads a day. They would pull the wagon through the field with a horse. My dad raised pigs and cattle and grew corn, soybeans, wheat, milo, alfalfa, and oats. My dad had a strong faith in Jesus and knew He was his only hope for salvation. My mom raised chickens to butcher and also to lay eggs to sell. She made sure we were all in church on Sundays. She had been praying for us kids all her life. My parents now have fifteen grandkids and sixteen great-grandkids. I am very blessed to have good parents.

About a mile and a half from my dad’s house sat an old rock schoolhouse. I attended this until I reached third grade. When I was in third grade, they had to close the school. The school had students from kindergarten until eighth grade. There was one teacher, and it was a one-room schoolhouse. There was no indoor plumbing, so we had to use an outhouse. It was not much fun, especially in the winter. My sisters and I would walk to school every day, no matter what the weather was like. I never liked to carry my lunch box home, so I would set it down in the middle of the road and start running toward home. This meant that my sisters would have to pick it up and carry it home for me. When they got home, they would be really mad at me. They would tell my mom all about it. The next day, I would do the same thing. I think they still get mad just thinking about it. One time on our way home from school, there was some ice on top of a box culvert on the side of the road. I tried to walk on top of the ice, but I broke through. My sisters had to pull me up out of the water. I was soaked from head to toe and had to walk another mile home when the weather was below freezing. I had never been so cold in all my life. My mom made a hot bath for me. When I thought back to this time in my life, it seemed like a hundred years ago because of all the change that I had seen in the world. I had so many good memories about those days.

My dad and my uncle shared a hay baler. In those days, we would bale our hay in little rectangular bales that weighed about seventy pounds. My uncle and his boys would come over to our house to bale hay. We would then go to their farm to help them bale. We would fill two barns for my dad and two barns for my uncle. Our moms would bring lunches out to the field for everyone working. They would make minced ham sandwiches, cupcakes, and coffee. I would treasure these memories forever. I would take these memories to my grave.

My cousins whom we worked with all those years were scattered all over the United States. We see one another once in a great while when there is a funeral. It is really sad that we only get together when someone in the family passes away.

After the rock schoolhouse closed, I started attending school in Auburn. I had to get on the school bus with my sisters every morning. The school that I went to was named Calvert Elementary School. I was very shy and afraid to go to a new school. Getting on the school bus in the dark every day was difficult. The routine was hard to get used to. There was a new addition being added on to Calvert that year. Because of this, my third grade class had to attend school at the Lutheran church that was across the street from the elementary school. Town school was a whole new experience for me. I heard kids say words that I had never heard before, and they weren’t nice words. At recess, we would play baseball, football, and basketball. One memory that stuck out to me from my third grade year was that my dad had a Lutheran brotherhood insurance salesman who was about thirty years old. He was a really nice man from what I remember. He would come to our house and sell my dad insurance. Our family always liked him. One day, we got news that he was killed in a car accident. That was the first time in my life that I had to deal with death. To a third grader, death was very scary. The funeral was going to be held at the church where I was attending school. The day of the funeral, we went back across the street to the school and had class at the library. My parents went to the funeral while I was at school. I still remember seeing the hearse across the street from the school and a man rolling a casket up to the church from the window at school. I had a sick feeling inside of me that day and several more to come. When you are young, death is hard to deal with.

Chapter 2

Growing Up

Excuse me, ma’am, how long will it be until we are in Honduras? I asked.

Sir, I think it will be over an hour. Just sit back and relax, the flight attendant said.

Thank you. I am just getting anxious about the arrival, I said.

At about this