Okay Kelley, but Chrysler wouldn't stoop to call it a Bronco I hope. Even down there.
Dan

 

yea he thought i ment 6L not cyl.

... man if it had a 6L hemi
and i forgot to add this story
i had someone call my xj a bronco II during the corvette rally, give it the iconic front end is all muffed up and does sorta look like one at night

 

Nope. The Antipodes may be whacked, but they're not that whacked! Great bunch of guys down in Oz, y'know...

 

Yeah, that's what I hear.

 

Believe me, if it weren't such a pain in the **** to get through an airport, I'd love to go visit Oz again. Absolutely loved it every other time I'd been there!

 

I'd like to make it there one day.

 

If you make it; don't forget that visiting the cities is fun - but don't neglect the Outback as well. That's what I did on my first trip to Oz, it was a Desert Survival class in the Outback, based out of Alice Springs. I actually ended up hanging with a tribe of Abbos for a while, and really enjoyed it (and learned far more from the Abbos than I did from the class! Learned even more when I went to Saudi for the first time, and happened across a Bedouin tribe. Learned even more about desert survival, and also had a chance to polish my Arabic that I'd learned in Egypt.)

 

Sounds like you've got a lot of interesting stories to tell.
Dan

 

Heh.

1) Never pass up an opportunity to learn something or do something. You won't ever regret making an effort. You will eventually regret not trying.

2) It's better to wear out than to rust. I've been through more trauma in the first part of my life than most people will go through in their entire lives - but much of it has been caused by living life by my own terms, and by my own rules. I've been killed twice, and "should have been dead" any of a dozen different times (I'd been in an iron lung twice by the time I was five - respiratory poison ivy from getting too close to a fire where it was being burned, and was almost recovered from that when I ended up with double pneumonia.)

Would I do it all again? In a heartbeat.

3) Even when it wasn't my choice (term of service in the Air Farce,) I stll got sent all over. By the time I was twenty-one, I'd done two tours in Antarctica (Wintered Over the second time,) and I'd lost track of how many times I'd been on every other continent. Had a knack for picking up languages through immersion - spoke a dozen or so fluently, and 8-10 more passably. The only languages I'd learned academically were Spanish and Latin, but I'd learned to speak Arabic, Farsi, German, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Hebrew, Pashtu, Urdu, and a couple of others well enough for the DoD to consider me "fluent". (Brain trauma is a b**** - lost 'em all five years ago when I got hit by a car - again! - and landed on my head.)

I keep being told I should write a biography, but I'd have to market it as fiction - I don't believe half of it myself, and I was there!

 

Sounds like an awesome adventure Kelley, even if you can't recall part/most of it. You should document it, you have a knack for writing things. My hat's off to you sir, and Thank You for Your Service.

 

And thank you for your acknowledgement - that's really all most of us want.

Yah, I may start writing it all down as I go, but I've got other things to write first - and I have more fun kicking sacred cows (jondkelley.blogspot.com) than trying to write novels or my bio. My "heavy" writing is all instructional and technical, the blog is just my way of entertaining myself while trying to blast people right out of their mental grooves and get them to think for themselves (instead of toeing the party line, whichever one that is.)

The blog updates irregularly, is sometimes NSFW, and is usually controversial. And I wouldn't have it any other way. There's no particular unifying subject - it's just me venting (and/or ranting) about current events as I see them, things I can see that really need to be changed, and just generally Helling around whenever I feel like it (it's not as fun as when I was Helling around in Kuwait in 1991 - they dropped us in just north of Qasr and we were tasked with "making noise."

(I'd always wanted to use an M72 LAW as an anti-personnel weapon...

(Then we got to SA, I called the DCM at the Embassy, and I think he gave birth to a porcupine. Breech presentation. You see, he'd just thrown me out of SA not a fortnight before, I was PNG'd and told I'd never be able to come back.

(Yeah, I was hurt. Transiting De Gaulle was the first time I'd had a beer and actually enjoyed it - but it was my first taste of EtOH in three weeks, and beer was the first thing I could get. I did find that European beers taste better than American beers, tho... I had two eggs, about a half-pound of bacon, and the biggest damned beer I'd ever had - Breakfast of Champions!)

My bio would read like a boys' adventure novel, but there ya go. Milestones:

8yo - started driving. Farm equipment. Hell, I was already big enough to reach the pedals
12yo - SCUBA card. 6'1", 225#, 10% body fat (est.)
13yo - Skydiver's Ticket. Unlimited Skydiver's ticket. Civilian Free Fall Ticket.
14yo - Private Pilot's Ticket. Acro Ticket (flew both tube-and-rag taildraggers and tri-gear SPAM cans...)
16yo - Driver's License (finally.) Black Belt in Aikido.
17yo - Motorcycle endorsement. Enlisted.
18yo - DoD driver ticket. Heavy trucks. Double/Triples. HAZMAT/Explosives end. High-speed driver training in Germany. Military Free Fall cert. Demo training. Black Belt in Judo.
19yo - Bled to death in an ER in Wiesbaden after being stabbed in a bar fight. I passed out from blood loss - which is the only reason they got me off of the guy. Me: hospital for a week. Him: hospital for 11-1/2 months.
Just before I'd turned twenty-one, I'd been around the world once - including both poles. North pole on a Navy joint service tour (USS Dallas) and South Pole (hiked from McMurdo Sound to the South Geographic Pole/Amundsen-Scott Polar Research Station. We were wintered over, we'd done everything we could find to do that needed doing, so we were at loose ends. Antarctic mountaineering and the like. It was a four-month vacation, not counted against leave balance, and paid. Why not?)

How's that for a start?

 

That's awesome. You sound like a big guy in character as well as stature.
"Duke" comes to mind reading and thinking about your post. Kick ****.