New Beginnings

In June of 2008 I was still working for Redi~Mix Concrete and I had been tasked with evaluating a Plant Manager training program developed by the National Ready Mix Concrete Association located in Silver Spring Maryland which is just a few miles north of Washington D.C. and I decided the best way to do this was to fly there and take this week long training class myself and report my assessment and recommendation to management.  During my trip to New Zealand a few years earlier I made a lot friends from all over the country that I stayed in touch with for several years. One of those was a lady named Helga who also lived in Silver Spring. This four day training class was conducted Tuesday through Friday, and since I had never been to D.C. and Helga lived there, I knew she would make an ideal tour guide. When the time came I flew into BWI (Baltimore Washington International) on Saturday so I could have a couple of free days to do some sightseeing. Helga suggested I stay at her ho...

 In June of 2008 I took Jacob on the first of two dad and son solo trips when we drove to Houston then to San Antonio to spend a few days together. He was 15 years old and had just finished his freshman year in high school. Our first stop was NASA and the Johnson Space Center. We start our self guided walking tour with the historic rockets that were used in the early years of the space program that were displayed on the grounds outside the Space Center in an area known as the George Abby Rocket Park. The assortment and variety of historical space program equipment is amazing and a really good display of this equipment. After spending quite a bit of time checking out these outside full size rocket engines and the full size Saturn series, we go inside the museum and it was just as interesting though some of the displays were replica models created for museum display like the Space Shuttle Endeavor Jacob is standing next beside in the photo below. While we are here we see there is an ...

When I was in elementary school, which in those days was 1st - 6th grade, I remember I always enjoyed it when the teacher would roll the film projector into the class room on that small metal cart. We would spend about half an hour watching a film that would be recreating an event from American history. The narrator would briefly describe what we were about to see and in a deep voice he would look into the camera and say "AND YOU ARE THERE!" We watched several of these hokey films but the only ones I really remember were the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Battle of Gettysburg. The acting was pretty poor and lines were delivered in a weird sort of way, but they were kind of interesting and it broke up our regular school day. As long as these films did not interrupt one of our two daily recesses I liked watching them. A week ago I shared a post on Facebook to start a thread about where you were and what you were doing on Nov. 22, 1963 which was 61 years earl...

Bear with me as I tell this story and I will tie this episode title in with this dad and sons trip we took to New Mexico in November 2006. Brad was 16 and Jacob was 13 years old. This is the third of these dad and sons trips the three of us would take together. The first was the hiking trip we took to Dinosaur Valley and Enchanted Rock in 1999 ( see Episode #31 ). The second trip was taken a year or so later when I took them to Colorado which I will publish in a future post.   The first time I went to Carlsbad Caverns was in early summer of 1967 when I was almost 10 years old and on a family vacation. I thought my boys would enjoy this trip even though they were not too keen on it when I first started talking about it. When we got on the rode and drove that near 500 mile trip to Carlsbad NM it became clear it would be a fun trip.  I took the photo below at the visitor center just before we take the walk to the entrance of caverns and we are told it will take about an hour and ...