California 2009

I hijacked Wendy's blog to give you all this little story, Dave.

I had my two weeks of army duty out in California about an hour north of San Fransisco. It was a great time and here are some pictures of my trip. These first pictures are all from Fisherman's Wharf in San Fransisco. The first is a picture of an old sailing boat museum on the dock with Alcatraz Island being in the background.


This is at the same museum, but it is a replica Viking ship I thought looked neat.
Here is the best shot I could get of Alcatraz. Thought about going to the island, but only had one day in San Fransisco, so decided to do more walking instead.
Here is the Golden Gate bridge.
Here is a shot of San Fransisco from Fisherman's Wharf. We actually parked near the top of city and walked a couple miles down to the wharf. Then we walked back instead of taking mass transit.


There were so many different pictures I could have gotten of people dressed up like this or doing funky things. This one worked really well because I had my camera out at the time and when we were walking past he froze like this.
Here at pier 39 they get a ton of Sea Lions. There are normally a couple hundred and at the right time of year there can be thousands.
This was again at pier 39 on the wharf and I thought the crab looked cool. My roommate was the one on the right holding a phone. When Alaina first saw this picture she was terrified until we convinced her it was not real.
We all went out to dinner twice while we were there. The first time, the Lieutenant that was with us brought us to a pizza place, but I don't have any pictures of that. This is the second one, from when we went to Fuddruckers. You might think it was weird that we went there, but it was right across the street from the hotel we were at and we had strict curfews.
I gave train rides to a ton of people while I was out there, because they did not have a whole lot of work for us to do after the first week. This first coin, which is the next two pictures, I got from a Lt. Colonel in the first couple days I was there.

This second coin I received from the Sergeant Major of the Battalion that we were supporting out there. He actually came up for rides twice and did some real work with us.


I gave rides to a handful of higher ups in the army, but gave a ton to the soldiers who were working out there. Most of them didn't even know the army had trains until they saw us. The funnest ride I gave was to a Chief Warrant Office-5, who was thrilled to be on a train.

I had a really great time out there and hope to post some more pictures in the next couple weeks. I need to go to the army website that has a ton of pictures and then I can show you a little of what I was doing out there.

Dave