Happy New Year: 2026

It has been a while since my last entry. What is prompting this restart is my upcoming trip to Europe. I (and Kate) have signed up for a Viking River Cruise from Budapest to Amsterdam.

Starlink comes with a 110v plug and 15m of power cord. I also ordered from Amazon, a battery pack that serves as a stand to give you 4 hours of connectivity. My plan is to take this on the trip to insure connectivity. If they allow me to set it up onboard it will be great, otherwise I will take it ashore daily to establish connection.

I am expecting this trip to be amazing, particularly the ending in Amsterdam. This particular city has a great deal of meaning to me and Lindsay in particular.

Prior to Christmas in 1980 I was on patrol abord the USS Sam Rayburn (SSBN-635) somewhere in the far North Atlantic. We were notified that we would have a port call in the Netherlands over Christmas. We transited down the North Sea and eventually moored in Rotterdam.

At the same time the wives were notified and given the opportunity to meet us if they desired. Lindsay, of course, had her passport from her trip to Germany for the Reforger Exercise when we were in San Diego, and being DINK’s we were able to afford it. We were informed that Lindsay and the Engineer’s wife would be meeting us.

The previous summer Lindsay had finally gotten a confirmed diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) with a new diagnostic tool, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (they quickly dropped the Nuclear to avoid freaking people out since there was no ionizing radiation involved), at Yale, New Haven. The MRI clearly imaged the lesions previously noted in autopsies of MS sufferers. They had offered us “genetic counseling” stressing the uncertainty of Lindsay’s future and the possibility of some genetic links to MS that were being investigated. We had long ago decided to have children “eventually”, but this gave us pause.

We spent the next couple of weeks talking about it. What we finally decided was not to be deterred. Lindsay could be perfectly healthy, have children and then get hit by a bus crossing the street. As for the possible genetic compromise of the offspring, I suppose you could ask them whether they would rather not exist, or take the risk of possible MS.

But that Christmas, unknown to me, Lindsay’s biologic clock had begun to tick loudly. I was thirty years old; she had just turned twenty-nine. In Amsterdam we talked about it. One of the quirks of ballistic missile patrols at the time was that if you wanted the husband to be present for both the conception and delivery, there was a two-week window to conceive. Lindsay had calculated (of course she had) that her period would line up with the patrol cycles about next March or so with delivery the following December. So that Christmas in Amsterdam is where we finally decided that we were going to have a family.

On of the highlights of that trip was the chance to attend midnight Mass at the Nieuwe Kirk, the “New Church” in Dutch. The Nieuwe Kirk was a huge dramatic cathedral in downtown Amsterdam. It was built after the Oude Kerk (Old Church of course), built a century or so before, was outgrown. I found the cornerstone of the Nieuwe Kirk after mass; it was completed in 1409. It became Protestant in 1578 after the Reformation, and at the time was more of a cultural center, but Midnight Mass was celebrated there in 1980. It really gave me a sense of just how new the United States was compared to Europe.