Home in Falls Church, Virginia from November 1995 to August 2005

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I had decided in 1994 that we would move back to the States as soon as I could find a job. My kids were growing up fast, and I wanted them to grow up in the United States. I didn't want them to experience the same adjustment problems that other expatriot children had as they left they became independent of their parents, and their benefits associated with their employment with the government or multinational corporations (e.g., no citizenship benefits, no work permits or visas).

As there were many base closures taking place with people losing jobs, this took longer than I anticipated. I paid for our home leave in 1994 and went through Washington, DC to visit the Pentagon to enquire about taking the position of my counterpart there who was retiring. They had decided to consolidate positions so that position was not available.

As it turned out, I had to wait until October 2005 when my boss worked a deal with my former boss at NAVFAC who wanted me back; so I swapped jobs with another person in his office.

In early October 1995 I took a quick house hunting trip and found the perfect house, a Victorian with a cupola and wrap around porch in Falls Church, Virginia. I signed the paperwork to buy the home.

I returned to Overijse to pack up our household goods and ship our car from Rotterdam. We moved into the U.S. Embassy apartments.

On 5 November 1995 we flew to Washington DC and stayed at the Residence Inn at Tysons Corner until we finalized the purchase of our home.

I was director of the Navy’s environmental cleanup and compliance programs for a couple of years. Then I was detailed to the White House Office of the Federal Environmenta Executive for several months before bing pulled back to become Program Manager of the Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation program, working with Norway and Russia to cleanup nuclear waste in the Kola Peninsula. After that I was assigned as the Assistant Director for Facilities Planning in the newly established Base Development Directorate. During these years most of my business trips were to our field divisions in Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, San Diego, San Francisco, Poulsbo (across from Seattle), and Honolulu, and to our Engineering Services Lab at Port Hueneme, California. All these locations were great to visit. I only visited Philadelphia once, but the rest many times. My only overseas business trips during this time were to Moscow, Russia and Stord, Norway in 1998 and Garmisch, Germany in 2005, just before retiring.

On these trips, after work in the evenings, I would try the regional food for each place. Charleston was great for the southern cooking. At San Diego I would visit Cabrillo National Monument which looks over the Pacific to the west and the bay and city to the east. I would then visit Hotel Del Coronado for sea food and the Old Town for Mexican food. I would drive up the coast to La Jolla, which had a wide variety of restaurants. In San Francisco I would go across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito, to Spinnakers for seafood and a view south across the bay to the city. There was also a funky restaurant in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco that specialized in garlic. In Seattle, before crossing to Poulsbo I would try the seafood restaurants along the waterfront. In Honolulu, I tried the local stuff…poi, etc. but never developed a taste for it. And in Port Heuneme I would drive up the coast to Santa Barbara to try out their seafood restaurants. One thing about the Navy, they were located in places with great seafood restaurants!

From Northern Virginia, we took too many local trips (those within a four hour drive of DC) to count, but they included to the east the Atlantic shore at faded Atlantic City and Victorian Cape May, New Jersey; Rehoboth Beach and Ocean City, Maryland; Virginia Beach, Virginia; and the Outer Banks (Corolla, Duck, and Kitty Hawk), North Carolina where we spent a week with Linda’s family over the 4th of July. To the south were the Civil War battlefields of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Richmond, Petersburg, and from there the trail to Appomattox. To the west was the Blue Ridge Mountains with the Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway. And to the north were the Civil War battlefields of Antietam, Maryland and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the War of 1812 Fort McHenry, Maryland, where Francis Scott Key penned the words of our national anthem, and the Revolutionary War battlefields of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania and Morristown, New Jersey. We visited the Amish country of Lancaster County every fall to buy pumpkins and corn stalks to decorate our home for Halloween and Thanksgiving.

And then there was always Washington, DC with the Smithsonian Museum and National Gallery and so many other museums. We attended the Kennedy Center and National Theater and saw the “Phantom of the Opera,” Les Miserable,” “Grease” with Frankie Avalon, and many other shows. We visited historic homes such as Mount Vernon, where we celebrated our anniversary every year. Our favorite destination was horse country around Middleburg. My kids got tired of all the history, but at least they could see it firsthand.

Each year we also attended the Memorial Day concert at the Capitol and the Fourth of July fireworks on the National Mall, and attended the free concerts given by such groups as the Beach Boys. And every year we attended the Smithsonian Folklife Festival also held on the Mall. Each year they featured a different state and country. One year they featured every country along the Silk Road.

Rosanna and I also liked to take trips on the spur of the moment. One Sunday after church, she suggested we go to New York City. I dropped the others at home and we headed north on I-95. About half way up the New Jersey Turnpike the radio announced that the Republican National Convention was happening that week in New York City. There would be massive demonstrations that day, so avoid New York City at all cost. We had driven that far so we thought we would see how far we could go. Well, we drove up to the toll booth at the George Washington Bridge and there wasn’t any other car in front of us. We drove down the Henry Hudson Parkway and over to Central Park, and found a parking space at the south end about 3:30 pm. We walked down to Times Square and had dinner at a deli, then over to Rockefeller Center and back to Central Park. We left about 7 pm and got home at 11 pm…twelve hours later.

We also had many visitors during these years which gave us an excuse to visit all the wonderful sights in the DC area. But the best thing was that we already had many friends there. Darryl and Marilyn, who I knew from 11th grade in Thailand, lived in Arlington. We would spend every Christmas night with them having great desserts. In 2001, Mike and Betty moved from Brussels to Arlington, so we spent a lot of time with them. And then there was Steve and Kay Joy, who I had known since first grade, and we had renewed our friendship by a chance meeting at the Ramstein AB Base Chapel in 1978. They were in Gainesville. As Kay and my birthdays fell on the same day, this was always a good excuse to celebrate together.

So Falls Church was a wonderful place to live, but after ten years we decided we couldn’t take the heat and humidity, the high cost of living, and the stress caused by too many Type-A personalities in rush hour traffic. But before I tell about my retirement and our move to Colorado, here follows our more extensive trips while we lived in Falls Church.

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