MorseBlog

> This Christmas I decided to go to the UK. I came to this decision for a number of reasons. I would be able to spend more time with Redington due to the way visitation schedule requires a full 3 days of recovery for him before his school resumes. I would be able to spend time with Vicki and meet her parents. And I had little surprise for Vicki. I flew to Heathrow via Chicago on the 23rd of December and arrived on the 24th at about 7:00AM. Vicki drove out from Bath (red star on the left) to pick me up. She then drove us up to Bedford to pick up Redington. (The star on the map just north of London.) We then proceeded to Vicki's parents house in North Yorkshire. They live in a small town called Kirkbymoorside. Kirk is the Viking word for church so the town is the church by the side of the moor. (Kirkbymoorside is the red star at the top of the map.) We had a long drive to catch up with news of each other. Redington had amazingly gotten bigger (5'9") since I saw him in Oct...

While in the UK over Christmas Redington , Vicki, and I took a day trip to Portsmouth home of the Royal Navy Museum. The object of the visit was to see the HMS Victory dry docked there. The Victory was Admiral Horatio Nelson's flagship during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Redington and I had read the Horatio Hornblower series together and so were big fans of this fictional series based on the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic wars. This is the Royal Navy dockyard where the Victory is dry-docked as seen from Google Earth. Here we are posing outside the Victory. It has 104 guns of 12, 16 and 32 pounds. It carries 6000 sq yard of sail and sailed as fast as 12 knots one of the fastest ships of its day. The Victory was built using the wood of 8000 oak trees of a size and age unavailable in the UK today. The ballast consisted of pig iron and shingle (gravel). The powder magazine stored 3 tons of gun powder. The magazine is lined with copper sheeting to fight static electricity and plaster...

Last Saturday the weather was so nice that after skeet shooting with Bob and Randy I decided to pack up and go hiking on the coast. I hadn't been out in a while and we don't often get this kind of clear (though cold) weather this time of year. An hour later I was on the road heading west on highway 26 to highway 6 toward Tillamook. I was heading for Neahkahnie mountain on a rugged stretch of the coast between Tillamook and Cannon Beach. I had read some time ago about this hike and recall it was described as strenuous. It took about an hour of driving to reach Tillamook and Tillamook bay. Here several major coastal rivers run to the sea including the Wilson, Trask, and Tillamook rivers. Tillamook is a dairy community famous for the cheese factory there. The bay was calm this afternoon and the weather shockingly warm. In Hillsboro it was probably about 45 degrees but here it was at least 65 degrees. Calm on Tillamook Bay Closer to the mouth of the bay where it opens to the Pacifi...

I went back out to the Columbia River Gorge for another hike. Not having any particular place in mind I took the first exit to old highway 30 and looked for a hike I hadn't done before. Immediately I came upon Angel's Rest and favorite of my friend Shyam at work. He and his family hike extensively and Redington and I met them in the gorge once a few years ago. This Google Earth shows you where the hike takes you on top of the gorge. (Click photo to enlarge) Angel's Rest from Google Earth The drive out was one of the windiest in memory. You can see in the next photo the whitecaps in the Columbia river. The wind was whipping water off the wave tops where they would drift as gossamer rainbows in the afternoon sun. The hike is about 2 1/2 miles and winds up through the trees. At first the wind wasn't too apparent. Near the top though the gusts were reaching 40 miles per hour. Dead trees were swaying from side to side leaving me wondering if they would snap. The wind create...

The week of Oct 24th I went over to the UK to visit Redington during his Autumn break. His school is year round and he has three extra one week breaks scattered through out the year. I was anxious to see how he was getting on and very excited at the prospect of seeing him again. This is the first of a set of seven posts on our Normandy trip. I apologize for the length. We did a lot in one day. I hope you find it interesting. For the vacation Redington suggested we visit Normandy and see the D-Day beaches and museums. He is a huge military history buff. The days before the visit I had bought a copy of Stephen Ambrose's D-DAY . Redington began reading chapters on the way to Normandy. He would finish the book by the end of the trip. It provided some illuminating context for our travels. As you will see we visited exactly places described in the book and read stories from both the defenders and attackers what happened in that exact location. Redington lives north of London in the town ...