Florida seems like a dream to me now. Or was that Saginaw? A couple observations: if you are heading to The Villages by air, it might make sense to fly into Tampa, which is about the same distance as Orlando, and does not have the throngs of Mouse Seekers. It is always true that the […]

I don’t know why my Lieutenant wanted to get a picture of his Grandfather in his Navy dress blue uniform, but I was happy to dig out a couple pics and send them along. Of course, I was packing in Florida at the time, and naturally wound up sending them to someone else in the […]

The lady in the adjacent room to mine at the Waterfront Inn in The Villages apparently went to sleep with her television on. I discovered that when the jumble of noises woke me at 0138 this morning. I tossed and turned for a while and finally was inalterably awake. I debated going down to the […]

The wedding was an impressive affair at the First Baptist Church of Leesburg, Florida, at two in the afternoon. My brother and I were honored to be ushers, junior participants in the ceremony. Which is to say we wore black bow ties and white shirts under our jackets and handed out programs, American Flag lapel […]

(R.J. Gators is a marvelous place to while away the afternoon). Now, if you think I am going to go all hipster authentic on you and start bashing The Villages, you would be wrong. Of course it is all fake. The artistically cool shipwreck in back of B.J. Gator’s bar? Sunk there on purpose, naturally. […]

The kid at the Hertz Gold checkout booth at the jetport in Orlando checked my driver’s license and nodded that I was ‘good to go’ yesterday afternoon. He asked if there were any questions I had for him, and I thought for a moment. “Is it true that The Villages has the highest rate of […]

Editor’s Note: As you know, I have been rambling on about a Med Cruise in 1990. I am going to do something completely different this morning and take you back a decade, to a troubled time on the Korean Peninsula. There may be more to this saga- I recently came across another manuscript of incoherent […]

31 January 1990 (French aircraft carrier Foch (R99)). Started out wild and wooly today. I actually got outside for a while…but I’m getting ahead of my story. The pandemonium level was extraordinary right through the early hours this morning. Finally had wrestled the genie back into the bottle; we had the DCAG’s graphics built, ready […]

27 January 1990. We were up at 0800 to arrive at the Elephant Cage- the circular AN/FLR-9 Wullenweber antenna array that helped track high value targets in the European Theater. The are nine of them scattered around the world, providing HF/DF direction-finding on high-value targets to the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF Rota). We […]

VALENCIA, SPAIN 25 January, 1990. (Aerial view of the port complex at Valencia, Spain. It is nice to be at the pier, instead of anchored out). It was a very nice day to pull into Spain. I was stuck on the ship all day and it must have been important to keep me there, but […]