New Beginnings

A friend of mine called me out of the blue one day in late in 2003 to say 'hey I want to hike Mt. Whitney and do not want to attempt it on my own, would you do this with me?" My first reaction was to politely say no, but what I said was I don't know about that, by the way what is Mt. Whitney? Little did I know that this crazy call was to be the catalyst to jump start my adventure traveling over the next few years. This metal marker is attached on a boulder just outside the small rock built ranger station at the highest point in the continental United States. At this time I did not know the significance of this hike and summit. I didn't realize Mt. Whitney was the highest point in the lower 48 states of North America. I did not know it was a hike, and not a technical climb. I did not know how hard this was going to be. I did not know fun could be this much work and this was indeed a lot of work! I did not know what I had gotten myself into. For almost a year I read, res...

 It is May 2004 and I am still working at Redi Mix Concrete and it is a common practice for material vendors to take customers out for entertainment and customer relations building. It is the same practice for our sales reps and our customers. Often times, that would consist of something as simple as lunch or as extravagant as a hunting or fishing trip out of state. Most of the time the most frequent activity was taking a customer to golf. My buddy Tom, who was my immediate supervisor for a few years and now these days I am a peer level Vice President with differing operational duties and responsibilities. Tom was responsible for purchasing many of the raw materials we buy did not hunt, fish or play golf. This presented a challenge to a vendor that wanted to take him out on a customer outing. One day one of our sales rep Scott and his boss, Stan came to Tom's Lewisville office to identify an activity that he would want to do. Long story short, they somehow agree on a hike at the Pa...

 In 2001 I was still working for Redi Mix Concrete as Vice President of Operations and one of my areas of responsibilities was that of plant maintenance. At that time we operated twelve concrete batch plants and I had a crew of four men that were true blacksmiths, that is they could fix almost anything. They had to be part mechanic, welder, plumber, electrician, fabricator and electronics engineers. They were an amazing group of men and I was proud to work with them. One of the guys in that group was in the Army Guard Reserve, and we would lose him one weekend a month and two weeks at a time during the summer for his AT (annual training). His MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was M1 Armor Crewman, he worked on a tank crew. This is what my older brother did while he was in the Army. He was dedicated to his military commitment and I never gave him grief or made it hard for him to be gone during these times and was proud to be able to help him when I could. As his employer I felt ...

 I have been flying a drone for about 9 years and have taken lots of pictures and videos of many of the sites of interest around the area and I have really enjoyed this new hobby. As a kid, I loved flying a kite, and I have said many times a drone is a kite for an adult. One day in the fall of 2017 I decided to drive up to Carpenter's Bluff north of Denison. There is an old iron truss bridge there that was used for vehicle use to cross the Red River to and from Oklahoma/Texas. A joint venture between TxDOT and ODOT resulted in a new bridge a couple of hundred yards from the old iron bridge and is now just a local attraction and you can walk across the river now on this old bridge. I arrived very early that morning in hopes of getting there before it got windy as the previous several days had been very windy by mid morning. I got the drone out, connected to the controller and ready to fly. I started across the length of the bridge from above but the wind was whipping pretty hard by ...

 Like many folks I know we lived in a mobile home for a lot of years. We started in 1985 when we were renting a very nice 3 bedroom 2 bath brick home in a very nice part of town. The landlord was my father in law's boss, so we got a really favorable rental rate. He got into some financial problems and lost all of his rental properties and other assets throughout town. The bank took all of his residential rentals and sold them. As the current renter, we had the first right of refusal but simply could not afford the house payment, taxes and insurance on the $8.25 hourly rate I was making at the time. There were not that many rental options in town and they were mostly the rate we were currently paying or more for a dump I would not want my dog living in, Plus at the time we had a 2 year old and a 5 year old so we needed a decent place to live.  We checked all of our options and the best thing we could come up with was buying a new single wide mobile home. The payment was about t...

We moved to this area in the summer of 1969, when I was going into Jr High school but I did not know of the legend until a year or two later. We lived about 5 miles south of where this bridge was located and it spanned a very large mostly dry run-off creek. The bridge was on a county road that was not paved, rather an old dusty gravel road, which like most roads in the area in those days. When it was still or very little breeze, the dust would hang in the air like a fog after a car and especially after a truck traveled down the road.  The first year or so that we lived here I would ride the school bus to and from school as we lived about 3 miles from it. The route I was on took over an hour to complete and most of the trip was up and down these rough and ragged old county gravel roads and by the time we got to school it would be packed full with a load of loud kids. At the end of the ride I would have to change busses to get on another one that would transport us from the high scho...

 The next morning I was up well before our scheduled meeting time so I walked around town as the town was waking and vendors were opening their stores. We were told our hike today would take us across the peninsula and there was no place to get anything to eat so if we wanted a lunch we would have to take it with us. We would not eat again until about 5 pm.  One of the places that was just opening was small privately owned market. I walked in expecting to find a sandwich to take with me for lunch. As I made my way around I found a bit of a meat market near the back with a lady working behind the counter. She kindly asked if she could help me. I said yes ma'am could I get a sandwich to go. She said 'a what?' I replied a sandwich. She says I am sorry, I do not know about a sandwich. So I described it as meat, cheese and bread. She then says 'oh you are wanting a meat roll'. I said sure, a meat roll would be great. She says grab the bread I want as she points to a stra...