Looking Back - With Google Earth

My wife and I both have itchy feet. Mine are itchier than hers, and probably smell kinda funky too!

That's probably why the two jobs I have enjoyed the most in my entire life were soldier and truck driver.

I know, the guys from the Florida Jobs office, whatever it was called back in 1962 came out and gave us all kinds of tests at Pensacola Catholic High. They told me I had an aptitude with words, but should stay away from anything that required manual dexterity.

I can't say that they were wrong, because as much as I prefer doing things that require activity, at least as opposed to sitting in an office behind a desk, I tend to bang myself up more than others around me doing the same thing that I am.

I even cut my finger on an orange peel the other day...but that's another (very short) story.

As a soldier, I have done, as the saying went, "more before 9AM than most people do all day". In fact, sometimes I did so much for such a prolonged period that I could not have told you which day it was!

By the way, there was only one time in my life that I not only did not know what day it was but whether it was morning or evening, and that was January 1, 1967. I had only been in Germany for a few months and spent the night at the NCO club drinking champagne and German beer. When I got back to the barracks, someone challenged me to chug cheap German rum out of a bottle down to a mark they had put on the label.

The rest is history, but for for the next couple of years, we could point out the dent in the wall locker where my head hit.

Anyway, back to my life in the woods and on the open road.

I probably enjoyed being a truck driver more than being a soldier, and both beat the hell out of being an accountant...which a piece of paper from the University of West Florida says I am!

So anyway, my wife has gotten hooked on Google earth, and this afternoon, we toured Monterey, California. We tooled along 17-Mile Drive, and looked at the Robert Louis Stevenson house. Then we went over to Carmel and tried to find Lulu's House of Silk, a great little shop we went into in 2007, the last time we went out there.

We used to drive for Schneider, so, since we were in Califonia, we took the Google Earth express over to Fontana, California and looked at the Schneider operating center we had been in and out of so many times. We discovered the dinky little truck stop on the corner where we used to weigh our loads was now a sleek and shiny truck stop, but Cherry truck sales is still on the corner diagonally accross from Schneider.

I took a quick Google trip over to Germany, to Bad Aibling, and looked for the barracks where I used to live (67 to 70), where the aformentioned falling down thing happened. As usual, one memory revives another, and I can remember....

The Rabid Hedgehog - don't ask
Beer Deliveries
The Girl I Loved Madly Who Worked in the Snack Bar - but did not speak English...or German
The Count, or Graf, Riding His Horse Around the Perimeter of the Post
The Mad Bull
The Kriechbaumer Gasthaus
The Only True Case of Levitation I Ever Saw
The German Cop with the Machine Gun
The Spinout in the Gym Parking Lot
The Upside-Down Car (x2)
And all those nights at the NCO Club....I wonder what ever happened to Sascha and the Metronomes!

And other things.