28 July 2000 Friday. I worked until noon while Linda packed up the car and organized the house. She likes to have the house in pristine order before we leave for a trip. Our neighbors Tom and Wendy would take care of our cats; we always took care of their cats when they were on vacation. I got home at 12:15 pm expecting to depart immediately. But there were errands; to buy a hostess gift, snacks for the trip and lunch. We finally hit the road at 1:30 pm heading north on US 15 to I-81. He hot heavy traffic and rain in Scranton. At 6:30 we called our hotel for that night in Syracuse to see if our friends, Buz and Kathy, who would be joining us on the trip had arrived yet. They had ... read more

I the previous three years our road trips took us to the Florida via the East Coast, Texas via the Southeastern States, California via all the Midwest and Western states, so we thought it was time to see the Northwest, broadly defined as everything northwest of Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, to include the westernmost Canadian provinces. We would be join by our good friends buz and Kathy. 24 June 1999 Thursday. The alarm went off at 3:45 am. Amazingly, we were all ready to catch the cab by 4:45 am, and made it to Dulles airport in plenty of time to catch the 6:30 am flight to St. Louis and on to Seattle, Washington. The only glitch was that our daughter Rosanna didn’t have a ticket. We explained to the TWA agent that ... read more

From November 1997 to February 1998, I was detailed to the White House Office of the Federal Environmental Executive, where I helped write several Executive Orders related to Greening of the Government. The only travel I did was for my boss. She got sick, and with 24 hours notice I had to fly to Lawton, Oklahoma to give a speech at the Oklahoma Environmental Educators Conference. I was in good company; following my speech Senator Inhofe gave his speech. In March 1998, I was brought back to NAVFAC as Program Manager with the Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation (AMEC) program between the U.S., Norway, and Russia. I took several business trips including to Moscow, Russia in June for a technical meeting. My trip to Russia was supposed to be for two weeks. The first week was technical ... read more

In 1996 we had visited Bob's sister Sue in Florida. In 1997 we wanted to visit Bob's other sister Judy and her family in Katy, Texas. Bob's youngest sister, Carol, and her family were living in Bangkok, Thailand, so that trip would have to wait for ten years. We decided to take the scenic routes for the most part, stopping along the way to visit friends and national parks and other historical and cultural attractions. 28 June 1997 Saturday. We headed west from Falls Church on I-66 and then south on I-81. Our first diversion was the Skyline drive and its extension the Blue Ridge Parkway, which we followed almost the full length to the North Carolina border. It was slow, but very scenic. We stayed the night at Johnson City, Tennessee. 29 June 1997 Sunday. ... read more

For the most part, my business trips while working at NAVFAC were of one week duration, particularly those that took me to te West Coast. Monday and Friday would be travel days with Tuesday through Thursday as work days. However, in August 1996 I attended a two week course on Environmental Law in Port Hueneme CA which gave me a two day weekend. Never one to waste two days, especially on the California coast, I and a collague of mine decided to take a road trip up the Pacific Coast Highway. 10 August 1996 Saturday. We left Port Hueneme quite early as we had set an ambitious itinerary for ourselves. We caught US101 in Ventura headed north, passing Santa Barbara, one of my favorite spots to eat when on one week trips. Our first stop was ... read more