100 and Done! (Countries that is...)

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We are back! This last trip brought the total countries visited to 100! It is a crazy milestone. It is difficult, time-consuming and can be (IS) expensive. After I got back from Antarctica in 2007, I started thinking about it. After 2010 I was thinking about it more (as I moved from NY to Georgia) and in 2014 it had become a real goal. Between Angie and I we have been to 109 Countries. We are tied at 100 countries each. We have 9 countries different in our lists. For example, I have been to San Marino. She has not. She has been to Israel. I have not, yet. There has been some fun competition in this area. That's why we had to establish rules. 1.) Must be listed (as a country) with the US State Department 2.) Being in an airport doesn't count. You have to get through immigration somehow and not in a DMZ or a no-mans-land 3.) A passport stamp is not required. I have been to Canada, Paraguay, and Uruguay without getting my passport stamped. There are friendly borders in many places...
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The bonfire was a lot of fun. Friends, family and neighbors came over. I felt like a kid. We dragged one of the old geodesic domes on the property to the fire and although everything was still wet from recent rain we got it burning, safely. G. Mills came down and we worked all day Sunday moving the fire around to areas missed and so forth. The picture of the jeep is a fraction of the scrap metal found in the piles. Everything from transmissions to major appliances to pedal cars to weird old farm bits smashed flat was found.

Definitely, it was a good time. We don’t often “slow down” to do stuff like this. Slowing down is a weird way to describe it since there was no slowing down at all and there was a bigger utility goal in mind in removing a junk pile. I guess it was just fun and I will leave it at that.

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