Last night Judy and I with Renee and Neil watched the July 4th celebration at the Hillsboro Elks Lodge from the comfort of our home, while sipping on lattés. The Elks put on a really spectacular show, and we were close enough to feel the concussion of the mortars. I mean come-on folks, it just doesn’t get any better than this. This is the good life!

While I was watching “…the rockets red glare and the bombs bursting in air,” I began to think about that night that in 1814 when Francis Scott Key penned the poem that was to become our national anthem. The fireworks display is a visual reminder of the bombardment on Fort McHenry in Baltimore Maryland. According to the Wikipedia, Francis Scott Key was being held aboard the British Ships HMS Surprise and HMS Minden during the night of September 7 1814. There he witnessed the British bombardment of Fort McHenry throughout the rainy night. The flag that Key saw waving by the dawn’s early light had 15 stars and 15 stripes and is on display in the National Museum of American History.

Today we continue to reap the benefits of being part of this great country. Over the past year we have traveled the length and breadth of our great country and our great Canadian neighbors to the north. People have been wonderful everywhere we go.

In our country we are able to cross from state to state without stopping at the borders and registering with our passports. What a great freedom to travel in our land. We can live our lives with a reasonable freedom from worry over acts of violence. What a wonderful freedom of law and order in our land. Everywhere you go there is food in the stores, fuel for our vehicles and clean water to drink. What a wonderful free market system we have to keep these in plentiful supply. Perhaps greatest of all, we have secure borders and our young heroes in uniform in far off places like Iraq and Afghanistan so that we all can live in freedom in this wonderful country.

Please join with Judy and I in a prayer for our country, our leaders and especially those heroes in uniform in our country and in the far reaches of the world representing the United States of America and helping to assure that the “…star-spangled banner yet wave, O’re the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

What is Next:
Now I have been a little lax in publishing our travel blog recently, but I am sure our faithful audience will cut us some slack, while we help Neil and Renee renovate a little “fixer-upper.” We work hard while we are here and when we get in too deep, we pull up stakes and leave for a week or two. That is what we are doing for the next ten days. We have been cleaning up our sailboat, “Regal Jug” and preparing to meet friends in Anacortes Washington and sail the San Juan and Gulf Islands. If I can find some wi-fi, you will hear from us, if not we will return in ten days

If you take this link to our web site, you can take a look at the before and after photo of Regal Jug after a year and a half of sitting out in Oregon weather. It was two hard days of scrubbing to get to photo two.

We send our love and friendship to all our friends and relatives.

Gary and Judy