After leaving DC, we drove to Nashville, and stopped at Graceland.  Then we continued to New Mexico to visit our daughter Nova.  While in NM, we all went down to White Sands National Monument, and then over to Carlsbad Caverns.

Nova at White Sands National Monument, New Mexico

Carlsbad Cavern is a great place to visit, and most nights in summer you can watch hundreds of thousands of bats fly out of the cave after sunset.  However we had a large thunderstorm approach, and the distant sound of thunder kept the bats in.

Thunderstorm over Carlsbad, New Mexico

But the next day, we went down into the cavern for about 3 hours.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico

After New Mexico, Megan and I drove across Arizona to one of our favorite stops.  Best Friends!  One place we go back to every time is an amazing, little known place called “Best Friends Animal Sanctuary”.   It’s the largest no-kill animal sanctuary in the world, and we volunteer there by working with care givers and helping re-socialize traumatized animals.  If you need a place to boost your Karma, this is it.

Best Friends is located in the southern Utah border just north of the Grand Canyon.  It’s also about 45 minutes from Bryce and Zion National Parks.  This place is ideally located to visit some of the most stunning scenery in America, plus you can help a lot of furry or feathered animals.  This time we worked in “Cat Village” which is composed of many houses each holding dozens of cats.  I usually work in Dog Town, which is now a TV Show on Discovery, but this year I devoted my time to the cats.  We even took one to our hotel in town, something all the local hotels allow.

Here are a few photos of Best Friends.  If you are ever in the vicinity of south central Utah / Northern Arizona, I highly recommend a visit!

Best Friends is located in Angel Canyon, in Kenab Utah.

Inside one of the kitty houses at Cat World at Best friends.

Each room in a kitty house has it's own outdoor play area.

Megan brushing a Kitty in one cat house in "Cat World"

Two of the lovely kitties we took care of at Best Friend's Cat World.

Angel's Rest is where those animals at Best Friends are laid to rest.

After Best Friends, we drove through Zion National Park to Las Vegas, spent 4 nights, and then headed across Utah to Colorodo.   There is some stunning scenery along that route!

Zion National Park, Utah

Spectacular Utah!

Looking across central Utah

Up over the Rockies, and almost hit an Elk..  Unfortunately for the car in front of me, as he totaled his car.  Then down the other side, and across Nebraska to the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan.

In the UP, we headed to Mackinac Island, one of our favorite spots in Michigan.  Mackinac is unique in that no vehicles are allowed on the island, only bicycles and horses.  The whole island looks like the very early 1900′s.

Mackinac Island, Michigan

Mackinac's 19th century homes and hotels are wonderful!

Mackinac Island public transportation - horse and buggies!

We took a tour in a horse drawn carriage, and then headed south to Megan’s relatives about half-way down the state.  After a wonderful afternoon with family, we headed across Ontario to Niagara Falls, and then on to Vermont.

Normally, I would stop in at my mother’s home and tell her about my travels.  However, we had a sad end to our journey.  My mother passed away a week ago, and her committal was scheduled at the end of the month, just as our trip would be ending.  My mother loved to hear about our travels, so this trip is dedicated to her.  I love you Mom, and will miss you dearly.

My mother’s committal was emotional, as she is buried alongside my father and sister who died almost one year ago.  They are all in a wonderful Veterans Cemetery in Vermont, with a gorgeous view.

Washington is very hot and humid right now, but coming from Singapore I am not too uncomfortable.  Speaking of Singapore – I miss the food

Megan finished her Anti-Terrorism Driving Course last week, and we both will be in our Iraq Familiarization course later in the month.  Right now I am taking come computer courses while Megan is taking some leadership training classes.

I depart Singapore on 1 July, and fly to Washington DC, where Megan will be waiting for me.  She left her post in Fiji yesterday, as she has to attend the FACT course, like I did before I went to Pakistan.  I’m taking some classes at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) for a month, and then on August 02, Megan and I rent a car and drive around the U.S. to visit relatives and take some time to play in Las Vegas.

Map of our Home Leave Route

We’ll be in training (TDY) all of July, and on leave all of August driving around the country.  On our trip, in addition to all the family visits, we’ll visit our daughter in New Mexico (C), spend some time working with the dogs at Best Friends (D), seeing some shows in Las Vegas (E) and head up to Quebec to watch the Quebec International Military Tattoo (M).   August will be a busy, but fun month for Megan and I to catch up after being apart for three years!

So I set off and bought a top of the line model, the White’s Spectra V3i.  This machine (left) is fully programmable, uses three separate electromagnetic frequencies, and is considered one of the  best metal detectors on the market.  I also found a used underwater detector that uses a different technology (pulse induction) on eBay for $350.  This machine is designed specifically to work better on salt water beaches.

The Whites V3i and the White's Surfmaster P.I.

With these two tools, I set out to search the sandy beaches, and specifically the wet sand just after the tide goes out.   People play in waist-deep water, and that is where they loose their jewelry and coins.  The cool water shrinks your skin, and a little suntan lotion helps ensure they come off quickly!  They drop in a few feet of water, and are quickly buried in sand.  Most people never realize their jewelry is gone, until they leave the water – and by then it is lost forever.

Well.. not quite.  When the tide goes out, I come back and search the now exposed sand and easily find their jewelry and pocket change.  In Singapore, the best beaches to search are those at the resort island of Sentosa.  Here, thousands of tourist visit daily and many go into the water to play.  These beaches are small too, thus the area to search is narrow and thus concentrated!

A little geeky perhaps, but having a great time!

Over the last 6 months, I have fine tuned my skill and can now average $500  over 4 hours of searching!  I can locate a coin every 45 seconds, and a valuable gold ring every hour or two.  I also uncover junk jewelry (children’s jewelry or steel rings) every 30 minutes or so.  Armed with a nice sand-scoop I can recover the lost treasures quickly, without wasting a lot of time digging.  I’ve recently been going out only in the early morning (6AM) and at night (7PM) where the air is cooler, and the beaches empty.  It’s a very relaxing hobby!

Here is a photo of some of the “junk” I have found in two months – searching just 6 times – four hours each.

2 months of treasure found on Singapore's Sentosa beaches.

While discolored, these coins clean up easily in a jewelry rock-tumbler – the ones used to tumble stones into polished round gems.  I add some dish detergent, and some sand, and in a few hours these coins look new again!  I have found over $700 in coins in just 6 months.

But the real treasure is all the silver, gold, platinum and diamonds I have found!  All together, I estimate I have $7,000 in jewelry in the last 6 months.  Not bad for a stroll on the beach 3 or 4 hours a week!  Here are a few photos of just some of my finds.

View Photo Album

I only have a few more days when I can search here in Singapore, as I am packaging up my stuff now for my move.  I will certainly miss this opportunity – as there are few places left on Earth where you can find this much treasure on the beaches, and have virtually no competition!

UPDATE:  Once back in the USA I sent some of my gold jewelry to an on-line gold buyer.  I got the following check in the mail a few days later.

Check for some of the gold I found in Singapore

View Photo Album

On this trip, at about 45 feet down we came across this fish pot sitting on the bottom collecting all kinds of beautiful coral reef fish. This area is a protected reserve, and so technically fishing is illegal, however Malaysian fishermen still sneak in at night and drop these pots. Whenever we find them, we open them up and free the trapped fish, as we are doing here.

Rescuing tropical reef fish from an illegal fisherman's pot

Seven Bridges Road, How Long, Busy Being Fabulous, I Don’t Want to Hear, Guilty of the Crime, Hotel California, Peaceful Easy Feeling, I Can’t Tell You Why, Witchy Woman, Lyin’ Eyes, Boys of Summer, In The City, The Long Run, No More Walks In the Woods, Waiting In the Weeds, No More Cloudy Days, Love Will Keep Us Alive, Best Of My Love, Take It To the Limit, Long Road Out Of Eden, Walk Away, One Of These Nights, Life’s Been good, Dirty Laundry, Funk 49, Heartache Tonight, Life In The Fast Lane, Take It easy, Rocky Mountain Way, All She Wants To Do Is Dance, and finally Desperado

What a fantastic concert!!!!

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The first ever

This event was created by the International Olympic Committee and it is modeled after the normal Olympics except the participants must be between the ages 14-18.  Events include swimming, diving, archery, gymnastics, basketball, fencing, rowing, judo, tennis, wrestling and many others.  They will hold a summer Olympics every 4 years, and a winter Olympics every 4 years and stagger them just as the adult Olympics.   The 2012 Winter Youth Olympics will be held in Innsbruck, Austria and will include alpine and nordic skiing, skating, luge, snowboarding and many others.

The Unites States sent 80 proud young Americans to this inaugural 2010 Summer Youth Olympics, but virtually no one back in the USA even knew about it.  There has been a virtual black-out on U.S. news about the event.  CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS are not covering it, and I have not been able to find one link online to any press coverage by any of these American media networks.  The only article I found on CNN.com was one that was entitled “Iran bans girls’ football team from Youth Olympics over uniform”.  Oh, IRAN… of course!  But that’s it?  Not a mention about our own team, or those of 203 other countries?  These kids deserve a lot more!

USA Youth Olympians

So while American news has decided these young athletes do not deserve any attention, our Embassy staff came out in force to welcome the 2010 Olympic Torch runner, and our Ambassador and Deputy Chief of Mission visited Team USA to show our support.

Torch Runner by the American Embassy Singapore

US Ambassador visits Team USA

Since I have weekends off, I looked for sites that were close by, and a colleague of mine introduced me to a site off the Eastern coast of Malaysia called Sibu.  It’s a tiny island with a couple of resorts, one of which is basically upscale camping.  Lodging is in thatched huts, no hot water, no boat dock, no vehicles (no roads!), pretty basic.  It’s called Rimba and was just what I was looking for!  And the best part is the price – $220 for a full weekend that includes all travel, lodging, and meals!

Beach at Rimba

The staff are fantastic, and we quickly became friends.  They have arranged a Malaysian driver to pick me up at the Embassy in Singapore on Friday night after work.  He drives me across the boarder to a small fishing village about 3 hours away.  From there a high-speed boat whisks me away to the island of Sibu where the staff are on the beach waiting for my arrival.  After being in the big crowded city, it’s like arriving in a small paradise!

Rimba has a house-reef that starts at the shore.  It is shallow algae covered rocks to a depth of 2 to 3 meters (tidal) until you go about 50 meters from shore.  Then the real corals appear and the diving is not bad at all.  There are loads of fish, hard corals, and even a few Black Tipped reef sharks that seem to stay in the area.

Nikonos V underwater 35mm film camera

I have wanted to get involved in photography, but I wanted nice hi-resolution images suitable for large wall hangings.  The cost to do that with modern digital equipment starts around $3,000 and easily rises to $5,000.  However, the best underwater photography from the 1980-1990s was done with a unique camera designed by Nikon using 35mm film.  The camera was the Nikonos V that came out in 1984 and was built like a tank, didn’t need an underwater housing, could go to depths of  55 meters, and could use the best underwater lens ever designed – the venerated Nikonos 15mm UW wide-angle lens.  Even today this lens can not be matched for image sharpness as it was designed solely for underwater use and uses a special curved front lens to correct for water refraction/distortion.    Fortunately, no one wants a “film” camera anymore, and so these gems are available on ebay for under a $100!  A full kit can be found for $250 – which can produce images that rival the new $3,000 digitals.

I started hanging out on ebay and and nailed a Nikonos V for $76 in near mint condition.  I then added a $125 strobe, and a 20mm wide angle lens for another $70.  I picked up a few odds and ends, and won a Nikonos hard-case for a wooping 99 cents!  So for about $375.99 I have a camera system that can make poster size images!

I went out two weeks ago and so here’s my very first attempts with this system.  I have a bunch to learn and will go back out next week.

View Photo Album

UPDATE! Check out my latest photos here!

Flag of Budapest

We got Budapest!

After we got our Baghdad assignment confirmed, I aggressively worked on finding a “Linked Tandem Assignment”.  Megan really wanted to go back to Europe, so I concentrated on that part of the world.  Here’s the full story:

When we bid on our normal assignments (after our first two directed assignments, the job of finding a new assignment rests in our hands) we are given a list of available vacancies for the upcoming year (we bid 1 year out) and then compete with everyone else for those assignments.  The gaining post first selects us, and then we have to convince the Bureau back in DC to choose us as well.  They usually go with what the post wants, but they do have the last say, and they can choose another bidder if they feel it would be best for the Department of State to do so.

So, once both parties (post and bureau) decide that they want you, they send you an email “hand-shake”.  If you still want the job, you accept the hand-shake and then HR back in DC has one more process to go through before the assignment is final (paneling).  This is the point where HR makes absolutely certain that you can take the job based on a review of your records and other criteria.  It usually goes smoothly, but nothing happens until you get paneled.  Once you are paneled, the assignment is yours.  You can start the process of looking forward to your new home… in a year.

However, when you accept an assignment to a war zone (Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan) you can bid on a follow-on assignment a year earlier – just after you get your hand-shake for the war zone assignment.  This means you are bidding on an assignment TWO years out, way ahead of your peers.  In fact, the assignments are not even listed in the usual way.  Instead, you have contact each Bureau and review the projected vacancies for that year.  Notice I said “you”.  No one helps here, and you are expected to do all this legwork.  You have to find a projected vacancy, contact the post to verify that it is indeed accurate, and then start networking with that post to convince them to hire you.  This is where a good resume, and good references come in!

so..

For Megan and I it was a bit tougher.  We needed to find TWO vacancies at the same post, for the same assignment period, at the proper pay grades.  Since Megan and I are the same job specialty (OMS) we has to find a large enough post that had two projected OMS slots that were not in the same office, otherwise we would never be able to take breaks at the same time!

I did the research with the European Bureau, and found four possible choices:  Brussels, Belgium; Berlin, Germany; Budapest, Hungary and Istanbul, Turkey.

I sent emails out to all four, and Brussels was the first to reply.  The post liked our resumes!
Berlin wrote back, but they wanted more information and they where a bit slow to respond.
Brussels wrote back quickly, but said no decision could be made for two weeks until their boss came back from leave.
Istanbul never replied.  I emailed three times, and even to Ankara but never got a reply.

So I did some research now and started emailing co-workers around the world.  I also went on-line to my favorite research site for post research – Tales from a Small Planet, and read their “Real Post reports” which are reviews of postst all over the world written by people who have already been posted there.  I looked up Berlin, Brussels and Budapest.  I gave up on Turkey.

The “Real Post Reports” pages has one all-important critique field that users fill out about a post they had just lived in.  They are asked “knowing what you know now, would you go back to that same post again for a future assignment”?  That’s a very probing question, and it sums up a lot.  People will write in “yes”0 or “no”, and then they tell why.  When you read these statements, and vet them against other factors so that you dismiss posters who are not in a similar situation as you, or do not feel the same way about certain issues, then you get a very clear picture of what to expect about the post.

Brussels came in dead last.   Only about half of the people who have been there would ever go back.
Berlin was a bit higher, but Budapest was an overwhelming 90%.

When it came to housing, everyone in Budapest enjoyed their homes, and the distance to work.  Brussels did not fare well here.  Most posters did not like the long drive to work, and said the homes where not liked that much either.  They also ALL complained about the weather.

So we then decided on either Budapest or Berlin… and since we have lived in Germany for 3 years (my USAF days), we decided to go for Hungary.

I then contacted HR in Baghdad for help.  Since they had just went through a lengthy and thorough review of our resumes and had actually reached out and interviewed our references, I asked them if they would please send their results to Budapest.  They agreed, and that would speed up the whole process for Budapest and reduce a duplication of work on their part!

I then contacted Budapest and told them we really wanted to take that assignment, an informed that that Berlin was also looking at us.  They said they would tell Bureau that they wanted Megan and I right away!  The next day we had our Hand-shakes, and a day later we got paneled!  It was very quick!

So now we have an assignment in the summer of 2011 to Baghdad (at very interesting time!) and a year later we head to Budapest for 3 years.  I am now all set until the summer of 2015 when we move to some other place!

I just got a notice that “clearly” states how I should enter foreign names, and how to enter them into the name fields:  Name1 is the western Last Name, Name2 is the First name, and so on.  Here’s the actual helpful instructions I got:

• Example:  Jason Alexander Chow:  “Chow” goes in Name 1; “Jason Alexander” goes in Name 2.
• Example:  Chow Yun Fat:  “Chow” goes in Name 1; “Yun Fat” goes in Name 2.
• Example:  Chow Yun Fat Jason:  “Chow” goes in Name 1; “Yun Fat” goes in Name 2; “Jason” goes in Name 3.
• Example:  Jason Chow Yun Fat:  “Chow” goes in Name 1; “Yun Fat” goes in Name 2; “Jason” goes in Name 3.
• Example:  Shanmugam s/o Subramaniam:  “Shanmugam” goes in Name 1; “s/o Subramaniam” goes in Name 2.  (This name contains no true surname.)
• Example:  Mohamad bin Maliki bin Osman:  “Mohamad” goes in Name 1; “bin Maliki” goes in Name 2; “bin Osman” goes in Name 3.  (Again, this name contains no true surname.)
• Example:  Mohamad bin Maliki Jones:  “Jones” goes in Name 1; “Mohamad” goes in Name 2; “bin Maliki” goes in Name 3.

Now thats as clear as mud!