We like to travel. When Carol got out of college she went to work for PanAm and that was a great experience for her. Because of that she just naturally is kind of an internationalist and she likes to go other places. So, we’ve been to Europe a number of times. I’ve gone to China. She’s been all over the world in her Pan Am years and then since then done some traveling with me; Mexico, I’ve been to South America. I’ve been on every continent except Antarctica, and when we were in Ushuaia, which is the end of the world down in Argentina, I was trying everything I could to get down there but it was just way too expensive. It would have been nice to at least touch the other continent.

I went to China a couple years ago. That was a great trip. Went up the Yangtze River and went to Beijing and the Great Wall. Went to Xiao and saw the Terra Cotta Army. Then we went to Tiananmen Square and that was quite an experience. At the end of the trip going to visit the panda bears I went with a small – our tour group was about 15 people which was great because you don’t’ drive in on a great big bus. A large van would do for us. We got to stay in people’s family homes and really got, I thought, a rich experience in visiting a country. We were there for about a month.

The last week I was there I went to North Vietnam which was a great experience for me having been in the North Tonkin Gulf looking at North Vietnam from the shore. We went and had dinner with a fellow who had retired from the North Vietnamese Army and he was an officer during the American War in Vietnam; that’s how they refer to it because they’ve had a number of countries they’ve fought…the French, the Chinese before that and the Japanese etcetera.

So, we had dinner at this fellow’s house and he was a colonel in the army and he was an engineer. He was in charge of designing and then managing the assembly and disassembly of this bridge that went across the Red River in Hanoi. They transported a lot of the war material to the south across this bridge. When the United States was doing the bombing of Hanoi we were trying to figure out how they were getting all this material south and we never figured out that they were taking this pontoon bridge apart and hiding it under the bushes during the daytime and then at night they would put it together and they would haul tons of military equipment out of the city across this river. He was very proud of this.

He couldn’t speak English but his daughter translated for us. It was an amazing evening because here we are sitting there. We were former enemies; you know, former combatants and I wondered – I asked our guide what they think of Americans and he said, “They love Americans. They want more Americans. They wanted the tourist dollar; the American dollar in investment now.”

I said, “Yeah, but what about the war?” They are thinking well they won so, yeah, they didn’t like the fact that we attacked them but they won. Like the Chinese they pushed back and the Japanese they pushed back, and the French they drove out, and the States that we finally drove out. We were just one of a long line of aggressors that they were able to beat back and rescue their country from. So, it was quite an interesting experience.