Category Archives: General

Headed to Houston

General

It’s about 1 p.m. CDT and we’re somewhere over southern Utah or western Colorado. There are no bright geographic markers on the ground and I’m sitting in an aisle seat making seeing the ground even more difficult. We are cruising along at 33,000 feet in a fairly smooth flight. The “we” consists of grandson Michael and me (and about 150 other people). Michael and I will eventually end up in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania (if not, then this is the last blog entry, I expect). The itinerary has us changing planes in Houston, Texas and then continuing on to Cleveland, Ohio. Pam (Nina’s sister) will pick us up there and drive us the rest of the way to New Wilmington. This was by far the least expensive routing for the trip. I’m taking three days of vacation for this trip.

The trip evolved over time and finally came together. Nina has wanted to go out east for some time (and this trip only whetted her appetite for a much longer stay). Daryl was taking a new job in Philadelphia and needed to get his stuff out there. Dawnmarie and family have moved into a new home and really wanted us to come and see their new surroundings. Meanwhile, grandson Michael had reached the age where he needed to be invited to spend a week with Nina and me. Of course, that visit had to include a trip on an airplane, because everyone else before him had flown on an airplane. In fact, when Michael learned that we were moving from Colorado Springs (thirteen hour drive) to Pocatello (three hour drive), he was decidedly unhappy because that might mean no airplane flight to go visit grandpa and grandma.

We decided to meet as many of these needs as possible. Nina would drive the motorhome out east, taking Daryl’s stuff and towing his car. He would go with Nina providing an additional driver and assistance if anything happened (which it did, of course). That would get him moved out there as inexpensively as possible. Nina would then go on to Connecticut where she would visit with family out there. Dawnmarie and family would join her there for several days of fun at the beach and in the sun. They would then go to Dawnmarie’s new home for another several days. Michael and I would fly out to Pennsylvania, giving Michael his big plane ride, and then he and I would drive back with Nina.

So far, that plan has worked out. Nina’s trip got off to a rocky start, however. The first problem was that the tow equipment on the back of the motorhome used to tow our car had to come off so that a U-Haul vehicle dolly could be used to tow Daryl’s car. When I bought the tow equipment, I put on a locking hitch pin. We couldn’t find the key! Finally Nina had to leave Pocatello and go to Salt Lake where she called a locksmith to come and pick the lock. It took him about 5 minutes to open the lock and then he made a new key for the lock. By this time they were a couple of hours late leaving Salt Lake City. Then U-Haul didn’t have the promised equipment! They had to go to another U-Haul location about 45 minutes away. All in all, that put them about four hours behind plan. U-Haul is a very difficult company to do business with and this just continues to prove how bad their customer service is.

The motorhome has not been on a trip of this distance before, at least while it has belonged to us. As luck would have it, a tire blew out about 30 miles from Des Moines, Iowa. The vehicle has a spare tire, but changing it is nearly impossible without some heavy-duty tools. For that reason we have Good Sam Emergency Road Service. Nina called them and they dispatched someone — not from Des Moines which was about a half-hour away, but from some place over a hundred miles the other direction! They sat on the side of the freeway for almost three hours waiting for assistance. I’m sorry, Good Sam, but we’re going to look elsewhere for road service when this policy expires. This was just plain stupid.

As an aside, whenever I post an entry to my weblog, notification is sent to several search engines that a new post is available. Some of these search engines are geared towards searching weblogs — Technorati and Pubsub are two examples. Several large corporations are searching these weblog search engines for mentions of their company name because they’ve learned from sad experience that people who write weblogs can be very vocal about bad service when it happens. In this case, I expect that neither U-Haul nor Good Sam are smart enough to look at weblogs to know what is being said about them on the Internet.

Daryl arrived safely and intact at his new digs near Philadelphia. Nina had a good week in Connecticut visiting with Peter and his girlfriend Moe and with her aunt Jean. Dawnmarie and family had a great several days staying in the motorhome with Nina and playing at the beach for several days. Nina is now back at Dawnmarie’s house and Michael and I will arrive there late tonight.

This trip didn’t start off to smartly for me. I needed to be to the Salt Lake Airport about 8:30 a.m. The drive down was wonderful until I got to Ogden. From there it was very heavy stop and go traffic the rest of the way to the I-215 turnoff for the airport. I had not expected the traffic to be so bad (I’m glad we don’t live there anymore and have to make a daily commute in that traffic). Consequently, I was about 15 minutes late meeting Michael and his dad Ty at the airport. We had plenty of time as it turned out, even with my problems at security. I packed this morning with the intention of checking my suitcase. It’s a small suitcase, but in it I had some scissors, a small pocketknife, a Leatherman tool, and a couple of screwdrivers so I could see about fixing the microwave in the motorhome. At the last minute, I decided not to check my suitcase because Michael also had a very small bag and didn’t need to check his either. I forgot about the stuff in my bag! Security found them, of course. So I’ve joined the list of dumb people who bring dumb things to the airport in their suitcase. My choices were to give the items up or to mail them back home. I choose to mail them. It’s a good thing that we had plenty of time!

The flight is completely full. I’m at the front of the plane, a bulkhead seat just behind first class. Michael is back in row 23. He originally had a window seat, but the flight attendant moved him because a woman needed to sit beside her infant. He’s now in an aisle seat. The next flight is not so full as this one and he has a window seat on that flight.

The motorhome has a couple of other problems. The fridge for some reason has stopped working with the result that a lot of food had to be thrown out. The microwave didn’t work when we were in the Tetons in June. That is probably an interlock problem. The machine doesn’t think the door is closed, so it won’t turn on the wave generator. I’ve no idea what the problem is with the fridge. When we get back home I’ll take it to the RV repair shop and have then fix the unit or replace it. Other than all that, the vehicle has performed quite well for Nina.

We’ve started our descent into Houston. We should be on the ground in about 45 minutes (it does seem a bit early to be going down as quickly as we’re going). It’ll be good to get some lunch!

The Last Day of July 2005

General

Sunday, July 31st 2005 is almost in the past. I think that time seems to pass too quickly and lots of things that I should have done are not even started. Dang! Today was a busy Sunday. It all started about 11:30 p.m. last night when the power went out. When that happens my nasal cpap machine stops running, of course, and I wake up. Sleep is impossible until power is restored and the machine starts working again. About 1 a.m. power was finally restored and I was back to sleep only to wake up at 6:30. I deliberately didn’t set an alarm clock so that I could sleep in as late as my body would allow. 6:30 was apparently the limit. After letting Bradica (the dog) out and getting her fed, I decided to stay up. Good thing, because starting about 7:00 the telephone calls started coming in.

I first heard from Nina who has safely arrived with Daryl literally in tow in Philadelphia. Daryl is now in his new apartment and will start his new job on Tuesday. The RV is empty of Daryl’s stuff and his car is unhitched from the back of the RV. Nina will continue on to Connecticut tomorrow morning. I’m wishing I was there for this big road trip! Nina was followed by several other phone calls from family and Ward members. In between the calls, I finished preparing the Sunday School lesson that I was scheduled to teach today, the talk I was to deliver in Sacrament Meeting, and practiced the hymns for Sacrament Meeting that I would be accompanying on the organ. That’s right: I was teaching a Sunday School class, playing the organ for Sacrament meeting, and was the concluding speaker.

The Bishop had called a couple of days ago and asked if I would be willing to speak on such short notice in Sacrament Meeting. He felt that I should prepare about 10-12 minutes on the subject of missionary work. It turned out there were only two speakers for the meeting and when it was my turn, there was thirty minutes left in the meeting. Because I didn’t know in advance how much time I would have, I had prepared a lot of material and set it up in a way that I could slice big chunks out if there wasn’t much time available. I used all of my material and we ended the meeting on time. I talked about my grandfather Nathan LeRoy Smith’s mission experiences in Samoa in 1912 through 1915. After the meeting, a member of the ward came up to tell me that when he was a teenager in Preston, he had lived next door to my grandfather. We had a great conversation and we’ll continue it at a later date. We’re cousins a couple of times removed.

After church I went to Soda Springs. I had picked up some steaks yesterday and had put some cheese-potatoes in the oven before leaving for church. They were ready when I got back after church and that was the dinner I took to Soda Springs. Tomorrow is my mother’s 81st birthday. We had a very nice visit and covered a wide range of topics. I enjoy going over the Soda Springs to visit with them. That finished off the day. I’ll publish this post, take care of the dog, and will head for bed. The workday starts early tomorrow morning!

A Somewhat Productive Saturday

General

Bradica and I are keeping the house occupied while Nina travels in the eastern United States. Her trip has been quite a saga, but that’s a story for her to tell. I’ll join her in a couple of weeks and travel back home with her. Meanwhile, today was a Saturday — a fairly busy day, actually. A company picnic was scheduled for the afternoon in a nearby city park. I was assigned to pick up some deli trays and to be at the park at 11:30 am to help setup. So, I spent a little while pulling weeds out of the area by the front door and then went to the picnic. It was a good event and people had a lot of fun. I took a lot of pictures, so they’ll end up in a DVD slideshow for people at the office eventually.

After the picnic I’ve been fairly lazy. I’m quite tired but need to stay up until about 10 so I can get completely turned around and through the jetlag problem. It’s only another 50 minutes!! I have started to put up some pictures from my business trip to Belgium. I started with the Flanders Field American Cemetery. Other pictures from Kortrijk, Ieper, and the Ijzer Front Tour will follow over the next few days. All of my posted pictures are accessible by clicking on the “pictures!” link on the right.

Home Alone

General

I arrived home on Tuesday night, Nina left on Wednesday morning for a major road trip out east. That makes me a lone fellow in the house. It’s very quiet with only me and Bradica (the dog). I’m coping with jet lag as well. Nina left about 6:30 Wednesday morning, so I got up for that and then went into work. I stayed until about noon and came home for a two-hour nap. I stayed up until about 9 and then crashed. But, at 4:30 I was wide awake. Tonight my plan is to stay up until 10 and get onto a normal schedule. We’ll see how that goes!

The High Ground

General, Travels, World War One

The High Ground Mill

This was the last stop on this 48-mile tour of the area around the northern World War One battlefield. By this time there was a pretty good rain coming down which only goes to soften and enhance the picture of the Van Couillie mill. The area around here is quite flat and was for centuries a bog and marshland which would flood during the late winter and early spring, never really drying out. Then came dikes and locks and pumps and the land was drained and reclaimed for farming. The pumps as well as the mills were all wind-powered systems. Gristmills were placed on as high ground as possible to catch the wind and then made as tall as feasible (and affordable) so that huge sails could be installed. This mill was one of the largest and tallest in the region. It was captured by the Germans before it could be destroyed by the Belgian engineers. It served as a lookout and surveillance point through much of the war. One particularly important use by the Germans was to look for and pinpoint artillery muzzle flashes so that the German guns could target the allied artillery. As such, the mill was also the target of the allied artillery as well. The picture shows what remains of the mill which stands as a monument to the war.

So, the Ijzer Battlefront Tour is complete. It took much longer than I had anticipated but was quite educational. Additional pictures may make it to the website! I took more than 800 pictures on this trip…. I finished the tour about 2 p.m. in the afternoon.

The original plan was to go to Church and then complete the tour in the afternoon. The Hotel people were kind enough to try and contact someone who would know where the Branch met. I got back to the hotel last night to find a phone number to call. It was the Kortrijk missionaries’ cell phone. They told me the Branch was now meeting in Moeskroen — a town about 10 miles south of Kortrijk. There was a French-speaking branch and a building in Moeskroen (Mouscron in French), so the Kortrijk Branch had moved there some months ago to save on rent. However, the missionaries couldn’t give me the address or tell me how to get there. They gave me the phone number for the Branch President — the same number I had called the week before. I called the president who told me that the members met “behind the train station at the bus stop — the only bus stop behind the station — at 9:15 a.m. and carpooled to the branch.” So, at 9 a.m. I was at the bus stop. There were no group of branch members carpooling. About 9:20 an elderly woman showed up (the only person I had seen anywhere in the area). She spoke only French. When I asked if she was Mormon, she nodded in the affirmative. She either didn’t know or couldn’t tell me that she knew the route to the Church building. She stayed about 5 minutes, then got on her bicycle and rode away the way she had come. I waited another 10 minutes and the left myself. It shouldn’t be this hard to go to Church in a foreign country!

So, I went back to the hotel, changed out of my church clothes, and headed back to Keiem where I had left off the tour the night before. After completing the tour, I headed for the freeway planning to make a fast drive to the office where I could get a good Internet connection (that’s where I am now, at about 8:15 p.m. on Sunday evening Belgian time — the times on the weblog entries are all Pocatello time). I saw a McDonalds on the way — the first one I had seen in that area — and stopped for a Big Mac lunch meal. Then to the freeway and almost an immediate traffic jam. There was an accident ahead. I crawled along with thousands of other cars for an hour to the next exit where I made my way overland to the office.

So, I’ve spent the last four hours fixing some pictures and uploading them, putting a picture on each of the posts relating to World War One. I started linking up some other pictures in the text, but haven’t gotten very far on that activity. When I get home I’ll put more pictures on the website under the Pictures! link. It’s been a good trip.

I’ll be in the office all day on Monday. I’ll check out of the hotel on Tuesday morning and make my way to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. My flight is at 4:30 p.m. so I should have plenty of time to get there. Early is good — I can always wait at the airport in the lounge! There will likely be limited posts until I get home from here. I’ll spend the time categorizing pictures and getting them ready to be uploaded instead. I’ve got a lot of pictures to toss out!

Belgium’s Knight-King Albert I

General, Travels, World War One

King Albert I

Albert, known here in Belgium as the Knight-King, along with his wife Elizabeth, were king and queen of Belgium as WW One began. Belgium had not joined either alliance and had declared itself neutral, as had Switzerland and the Netherlands. In the course of international politics, that had no bearing for the Germans. They demanded that Albert allow the German army to pass through Belgium on it’s way to France to do an end run around the French army which was stationed all along the French-German border. The Germans fully expected Albert to capitulate and were not pleased when he did not but rather mobilized the Belgian Army. The Germans struck first at Liege, a reasonably well fortified city, thinking they could quickly take that city, move through Antwerp, and west and south from there. Albert instructed his army to resist at all costs and what the Germans expected to do in two days took more than ten days at a significant cost of lives for the Germans. Meanwhile, the British Expeditionary Force was moving in to help defend Antwerp. The Belgian army fell back to Antwerp and defended that city as long as possible, then falling back again to the Ijzer River. Fortified by the British and some French, they made a stand there.

The Germans invaded Belgium on 4 October 1914. On 18 October they were finally at the Ijzer River, a full ten days behind their Grand Plan’s schedule. After seven more days of heavy fighting, the Belgian army was faced once again with the need to fall back. Then a brilliant plan was put forth. Much of this region was below sea level with locks and dikes holding the ocean back. Karel Cogge, the lock keeper, and Hendrik Geeraert, a sea captain, opened the locks so that at high tide the waters would flood the lowlands. It took a couple of days for the full flooding to occur, but it stopped the German advance. Meanwhile, the British and French had also stopped the Germans all along a line south into France. That line would more or less be maintained for the next four years.

The huge memorial to King Albert at Nieuwpoort commemorates the king’s role in this event. Albert was the commander-in-chief and was with his troops (or at least with his officers) during these battles and retreats and at his command the Belgian army was finally able to make a stand that lasted for the remainder of the war. Albert seems to be both venerated and scorned. His military actions earned him the veneration. His failure to keep promises to the Flemish people caused significant problems that lasted through WWII. By not following through on his promise to make the Flemish language equal with French, a near civil war occurred after World War One. That encouraged the Germans during WWII to make promises to the Flemish people, who by that time were all tired of being second-class citizens. Many Flemish dissidents collaborated with the Germans during WWII feeling at that time that the Germans were going to win the war and they wanted to be on the winning side. More than 200 collaborators were executed in the months following the end of WWII. That caused the dissidents to resort to terrorism which further inflamed the Belgian Government. Much violence and bloodshed could have been avoided if Albert had only kept his promise. Politics are never simple and this situation was no exception. The lens of hindsight makes the poor decision-making stand out while I’m sure the events of the day were clouding up everyone’s vision.

Just outside King Albert’s memorial is a large monument to the British soldiers killed in the defense of Antwerp. Around the monument was a very thought-provoking statement. It had essentially no beginning or end — it could just be read around and around. I wrote it down starting at an arbitrary point:

“At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them. They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.”

Travel Adventures in Belgium

General, Travels

Since the train runs between Kortrijk and Oudenaarded, and Friday was a day where very few people would be at work, I decided to take the train rather than drive. Getting to Oudenaarde was no problem, except the train schedule didn’t seem to be the real train schedule. The schedule listed a train at 7:47, but there was no train. The one scheduled at 8:08 turned out to be at 8:06 instead. But with all that, there was no problem with the trip. It was fast, much easier than driving. It took about 10 minutes to walk from the hotel to the train station in Kortrijk, the actual train ride was about 25 minutes with two stops, and another 15 minutes to walk from the train station to the office.

Before I left the station in Kortrijk, I checked to see what the schedule was to return. It said there was a train on normal days at 2:28 p.m. or on weekends and holidays at 2:29 p.m. The next train was an hour later. I decided I’d leave the office at 2, catch the 2:20-something train, and all would be well. As luck would have it, I didn’t get out of the office until 2:10, so I really hiked down to the station. There were several tracks, and each had a train. Which one went to Kortrijk? I went up on the platform that I arrived on and asked a person. He told me this was the train to Kortrijk. I should have asked someone else! It turns out he spoke French and didn’t understand me for sure because the train went south instead of west and I ended up in Ronse instead at the next stop. So, here I sit on the train headed back to Oudenaarde. I’ll now be on the 3:20-something train. I should have enough time to ask the station master which train to take this time. I’ve got a telephone conference at 4:00 p.m. and I’ll be late. I forgot to bring my Blackberry with me today — it’s sitting on my bed waiting for me to put it on my belt! So, I’ve no way to call into the meeting until I’m back at the hotel room. Dang.

It’s now 3:29 and I’m on the train to Kortrijk from Oudenaarde. The train left a minute ago and I’ve verified with a couple of folks that this is the right train. It’s going a different direction than the last one, so that much is good. It’s a very cloudy day, so there are no shadows to indicate which direction we are going.

We’re going past the nuclear power plant, so we’re definitely headed in the right direction. The countryside is very pretty and very European. Lots and lots of small farms with multitudes of cows. I think that most of the farming must exist to feed the cows. The farms are generally well kept and tidy; a far cry from many of the farms in the back roads in southeastern Idaho. Almost every house that has a back yard coming up to the train tracks has a garden growing vegetables of some sort. Very few have grass in the back yard so it’s definitely more for growing things. Once I get to Kortrijk, I’ll have to hurry to the hotel. Perhaps there’ll be a taxi close by that I can take. It might be worth it.

This train moves quite fast between stations — faster than I’m allowed to drive on the highway. That’s probably why the train gets there more quickly, even with the stops. We’ve passed a couple of windmills — somewhat different than those in Holland but still windmills. I think I need to build one and start generating some electricity. Perhaps I can use the electricity to put pathway lighting in, or to put some lights in the back yard around the fence.

This must be more of an express train. We’ve passed a couple of stations where we stopped this morning. It’s time to put the computer away as we’re fairly close to Kortrijk! At this rate I’ll have plenty of time to walk to the hotel. It took only 14 minutes to go from Oudenaarde to Kortrijk. The fastest I’ve driven is 28 minutes — or twice as long.

Well, I’ve arrived at the hotel in plenty of time for my meeting. I could even answer a couple of e-mails!!