High Speed Trains?

I'll be honest, when I saw this headline on CNN last week, my heart almost skipped a beat from excitement.

Obama unveils high-speed passenger rail plan

Kay and I were won over to the high-speed rail mentality from our time in Europe. It was efficient, cost-effective, environmentally friendly... and fun! When we voted on the California ballot proposition last November to fund a high-speed train from Anaheim to Sacramento, we were hopeful and definitely in support (as apparently were the majority of Californians), but we figure it was years before anything began to happen on a national level. All in all, any president who pushes for high-speed rail mass public transit has our support.

Here's Kay enjoying the experience of travel on a high-speed train in Germany. (You can tell it's fast because everything is blurry outside the window.) :)

A New Friend

Last weekend we travelled north to Fairfield (20 min. east of Napa) to visit our new friend Bill.

Bill is 95, lives alone, landed on Omaha beach in 1944 (D-Day), was Ty Cobb's physician, drew up the State of California Nuclear Emergency Response Plan, watches blue-rays, uses an iphone, loves to email, and just purchase himself a new MacBook (to go along with his Dell laptop and desktop PC).

While we were there, he pulled out a stack of old black-and-white photos and started showing us actual pictures of the D-Day landing. Come to find out, the man carried a camera with him during the whole thing. We were flabbergasted. Who did that? It's not like everyone having a camera on their cell phone today. He told us how he would real quick stick the camera out the window in the boat and snap a picture. "I wasn't going to stick my head out with all those bullets whizzing by," he told us. Or he would stick the camera up from his fox-hole real quick as bullets were thudding into the sand all around him. Crazy!

Even cooler, the man would not live in a retirement community because he didn't feel it would appropriately stimulate his mind. He still reads and talks theology. In fact, he thinks most people consider him a heretic for some of his non-typical views. Saturday afternoon Kay got a headache because Bill and I talked Trinity, salvation, human origins, the Nephilim, the person of Christ, and the dimension of time for four hours. Bill said his only regret was that I didn't try to convince him his views were wrong. It probably goes without saying that we got along very well!

All in all, it was a very nice weekend away with a new friend.


Oh, and for all those who think California is just one giant metropolis of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco... feast on a couple of pictures of the most gorgeous pasturelands I've seen since Switzerland!