The Nina and the Pinta

In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue...
Replicas of the Nina and the Pinta sailed into the Menominee River yesterday, docking at the NestEgg Marina in Marinette, WI. The Nina, 65 foot, and the Pinta, 85 foot, have been touring the US and foreign ports since 1992.

Barbie is home

Barb made it home today flying from Oklahoma City to Green Bay with a stopover in Chicago on United Airways. Home is wherever the motorhome is parked.

Vietnam Memorial Moving Wall

Yesterday I visited the Vietnam Memorial Moving Wall as it came into Marinette, WI. The Moving Wall will be in Marinette from July 2nd until July 6th.

From StarBand Satellite to Verizon Wireless

We have changed how we access the Internet in our lifestyle. From November 2004 until April 2009, we used StarBand Satellite Internet with a large satellite dish setup on a tripod outside the motorhome. This was cumbersome and time consuming to setup and took up a lot of our storage space while traveling. Our connection was slow, we had to make sure that we didn't have any trees in the way, and it was expensive costing us $150 a month for their fastest connection, 1 mb down and 256 kb up. Our equipment was old and obsolete and StarBand wanted to force us to upgrade our equipment for several hundred dollars. While Barb was in the hospital, I bought a Verizon Wireless aircard so she could get her email and play her online games. While in a Verizon network, our connection speed is much like DSL, while in their Extended Network it is like what we had with StarBand, slow but usable. I also bought a Digi Wi-Point 3G celluar wireless router for the motorhome. We now have our own Wi-Fi network of 3 computers on a celluar connection that works great. No more lugging around the bulky satellite equipment taking up valuable storage space then looking for a clearing to set it up, which in Wisconsin is hard to find at times. We even have an Internet connection while traveling down the road. And with the advancement of celluar, if we have a cell phone signal, we have broadband Internet to all our computers. We have the Verizon Wireless 5 GB data plan, which is basically unlimited, for $60 a month.

Side trip to Eaton, IN

This past Wednesday, I took John Winter's boat to his brother's house in Eaton, IN for storage. Eaton is 450 miles from Oconto on SR-3 between Muncie and Fort Wayne, IN. I returned to Oconto on Friday.