Miscellaneous

Where I’ve Been, And Why I Haven’t Posted In A While

Author: Howard Ahmanson

I apologize to my Gentle Readers for my long silence.  I’ve just been on a long road trip around the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia; up from Copenhagen to the top of Sweden, then down through Finland, then through the three Baltic states to Poland and Germany and back to Copenhagen.  I am attaching a few pictures that I took, though I did not take very many because it’s my wife’s hobby to photograph churches and ecclesiastical art and so I don’t try to compete with her in that.  Generally, I’m too tired from marching around cities looking at things to do any posting later in the day – my energy in the late afternoons is usually quite low.  And I didn’t have that much free time – we were usually either driving or marching around cities most of the days.

This says, “Pay with a credit card. It’s better for the environment.” I thought that a rather unusual sentiment.
It is not uncommon to see votive offerings of thanks for a healing in a Catholic Church, but I had never before seen votive skateboards before – and this was in a Lutheran church in Vadstena, Sweden. Vadstena was the home of the important Saint Brigid of Sweden.
I brought an inflatable paddleboard along, which saved my marriage and made me more willing to go on long expeditions of this kind. Here is me coming in for a landing in Trakai, Lithuania.
And here is me coming in for a landing near Mragowo, Poland. Now, Gentle Reader, you know more about what I look like than you probably wanted to know!
Peenemunde is where, under the Nazi government, they experimented with rocket launching before there was ever a Cape Canaveral or a Baykonur or astronauts or cosmonauts. Here the V1 and V2 rockets were developed that irritated the British greatly in the last portion of World War II. One reason that Hitler didn’t give up even though Allied and Soviet armies were sweeping through Germany is that he thought some miracle weapon was about to be developed that would turn the whole situation around. The German scientists were partitioned after the war. Werner von Braun, among others, fled to the West, and the CIA saw to it that his record was magically cleansed so that he could work for America.

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