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 weather this week in SoCal has been pretty much as it has been for months, 75 Degrees F and 50% RH. The rest of the US is having a heat wave.

I remember the first "man-on-the-moon" as we called it. I was 8 years old. Some of the memories I have was that it took soooo long for each phase of the mission. The decompression of the LEM after they landed seemed like eternity. I complained and my OLDER sister said something like "You don't want the astronauts to open the door early and get sucked out of the lunar module"... followed by the typical "DUH." I remember the video simulations (not real video) of the events when there was not video available (lots). I remember the actual video as well with "live from moon" I think it was blinking. It was analog B&W. It absolutely sucked compared to today, but it seemed a lot better than what I am seeing on youtube today. Maybe because my Dad probably put fresh vacuum tubes in the TV just before the event. I also remember going outside and seeing and hearing no one. In those days we spent a lot of time outside, especially kids and especially on a nice Summer day. There was no one playing, no one washing their cars.

The other thing that strikes me is everything else going on in that era, in the span of about 1 year, we had:

  • Woodstock
  • Kent State shooting
  • Vietnam war at its peak-- neighbors not returning home
  • Martin Luther King assassination
  • Another Kennedy assassination
  • The 1968 election-- even for a kid it was big deal

I like this podcast/youtube. We lived the context of what was going on. It was definitely real. It was science. We didn't talk about STEM we lived it.


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