Saturday, March 31, 2007

Moon Landing publications (Apollo 11)

Apollo 11 Moon Landing 
In the sixties I was a huge space fan. I read a lot of science and science fiction books. Until Apollo 11, I had not missed watching a televised American space launch. The big exception was Apollo 11. 
By the day of the launch I was in the middle of a student trip to Paris. I had a small transistor radio and listened to the launching and news about the landing from the tiny speaker. Sometimes I was able to receive Voice of America but other times I could only get the French translated version with the original English faintly heard in the background. 
The landing was in the evening with the actual Moon Walk late at night. We asked the dormitory manager if we could use his television for the Neil Armstrong one small step for mankind. Unfortunately he forgot to mention that their TV was broken! Argh! So it was back to the tiny radio for the big event. 
I did save my International Herald-Tribune from July 21st. Over the years I saved several more newspapers and magazines from that big week. I have several such as that Herald-Tribune and an unopened Life magazine framed in my hallway. 

Apollo 16 Moon Flag 
I was impressed in 1972 when my new friend Tom H. told me that his father's secretary was marrying an Astronaut. The following year I visited Tom's Family in Nassau Bay, Texas. That is very close to the Johnson Space Center.
Tom's father had a small framed nylon American flag in the front hallway of his home. I was impressed to discover that it was a signed memento from John Young from his Apollo 16 moon walk. 
During that visit I finally saw the film from the Apollo 11 landing in a theatre at the Space Center. Looking back it is amazing how our instant communications and universal video recordings have changed our memories of many events. 
In decades not so far in the past, if things were not caught on TV the first time around one might never see them in reruns. Tom was riding lawn mower for the space program at the Space Center and Vandenburg Air Base. Eventually I talked him into driving me home and we have visited each other many times since.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Long Pause from blogging (NotSorry Expansion)

I am back from a rather long pause from blogging. I started doing this in October last year and finally got going in November. Then one day I started to write a blog about how I created Notsorry.com and all my plans to make additions and improvements. I realized that there was a lot of an awful lot of work that I had been putting of for several years. So I decided to do something about the missing pages. 
In 2002 I had spent many hours scanning my old slides. I organized and renamed and edited. But then I did nothing about them except file them away. Later I scanned some old photo albums. So now -- since November -- I have edited and cleaned them all up. I selected the best and posted them on new web pages. 
My new pages include the following:
My World Trip 1974 to 1975 This shows my round the world trip that took me from December 1974 to October 1975. The first section includes Hawaii, Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia and Sailing to Singapore. The second section includes Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece, France, Holland and Great Britain.
Travels in East Asia 1983 to 1985 This shows my travels in the early eighties that include the Philippines, Taiwan, China and Japan.
France Student Trip 1969 This is a single page covering my student trip to France and England in 1969.
Canada Pages This new section covers my photos that I took on my various travels across Canada. Pictures from British Columbia are shown in a separate section of BC Pages Here I cover various places -- some very small -- in BC outside of Greater Vancouver.
Vancouver Pages This section covers various part of the Vancouver area.
USA Pages Here I show my various pictures from all over the United States.
My old web page sections include Round the World Trip 2000 This shows my travels across the northern parts of Asia and Europe in the spring of 2000. Most of these pages were edited and posted on the go as I did my travels.
European Trip 2003 This shows my trip to France, Belgium and England in spring of 2003.
[This page was updated in 2020 with links to Archive.org]