The 2nd day on the road was pretty uneventful. We took Hwy 50 most of the way to St Louis. Saw some nice back road towns, and as we got closer to St Louis the road got hillier and windier. That was a nice change from the long flat open stuff we typically travel.
My daughters car tracking us all the way...
Entering St Louis...
Made it to my friend Damon's place...
That evening was primarily spent right here on the back patio, drinking beer, BS'ing, planning the next days schedule and catching up.
I met Damon in the navy. That's him looking at the camera. His youngest boy in the yellow tee. Whenever we get together, no matter how long it's been since the last time, we take off like it was yesterday. He always tells the same story about how we met and ended up getting tangled in each others lives to his friends when he is introducing me, so I will tell a version of it here.
Damon and I were in the navy nuclear power program together. When we got to Orlando for nuke power school there was a waiting period before we would start in the classes. In the meantime the quarter masters are responsible for assigning all of us idiots fresh out of A school to menial tasks around the base to keep us occupied until the day comes that we start to learn stuff. Damon and I got assigned to "trash watch". I'm not making it up, that's what it was called and where we first met.
Everything taught in the nuke power school is pretty much classified. Most of it was available through the library or other public records, but there were things specific to actual navy plants and I suppose the procedures for our training, etc that the navy didn't want dumped in the local landfill. Our job, the trash watch, was to show up around noon each day at a loading dock. The morning trash had been deposited there. We sorted through it. Every bag was scrounged through. Every paper that had anything on it even remotely tied to the training was pulled out and set aside for proper disposal. The aluminum cans were bagged and tossed into a semi trailer parked behind the dock. The rest was just trash and would go to the dumpster.
At first we just thought, ewww. Several guys in school were tobacco chewers. No smoking was allowed in the school and leaving for a smoke wasn't really an option outside of lunch time. Lots of partially full coffee cups and chewed gum in there. You got used to it pretty quickly and the yuck factor waned. After an hour or so of sorting, we were done. Then we waited, there in the trash dock, until afternoon when we would head out into the school and get the afternoon trash and haul it back to the dock. This was around 3 or so, when it would rain like the sky was dumping the ocean for about 15 minutes everyday and the sun would poke back out and you could watch the moisture radiate out of the ground like a vampires myst. Oh yeah it was hot. The hottest wettest place on earth as far as I knew at the time.
Anyway, we sorted that trash, cleaned up the dock, found the quarter master in charge of us and begged for dismissal. That's where I met Damon.
After that, we were put into the same section (class) in nuke school. We made it through that and got assigned to the same prototype facility in Idaho. We ended up having to wait again for our school to start and we got assigned to the maintenance training group (MTG). It was a group of fleet machinist mates on shore duty that did maintenance in the prototype plants. These are operational nuclear reactors based on actual ship/submarine reactor plants that are operated by us students with qualified operators looking over our shoulders.
We started in the same class again, which is on a rotating shift work schedule. We were on the same shift.
We managed to make it through that hell and were getting orders for where we were going in the fleet. Before that though, I was going to be a ships emergency welder, so I was going to San Diego to go to an abbreviated Hull Tech welding school. Damon didn't do that, which put a slight shimmy in our groove. I have an uncle that was a chief of the boat (COB) on the USS Nevada. A trident missile boat in Bangor, WA. He wanted to get me assigned to his boat. Well they didn't need a welder. Each crew of each boat is allowed 2 welders only. So he said, "fine, just give me the next guy on the list then. And get Wells assigned to the boat that has the closest patrol rotation as the Nevada." That was Damon. I was sent to the USS Michigan. Our patrol cycles were about 2-3 weeks apart.
We both did our 6 years, got married, had kids or were about to in my case and were going back to civilian life. Damon is from Decatur, IL. I'm from MN but my wife is from Idaho, which is where we went. Somehow Damon ended up in MN. About an hour drive from where I grew up.
He was working with a guy that was a boiler inspector, but had been laid off and doing energy surveys for a utility. I was working at a potato dehydration plant. I got laid off and actually found a job back in MN, so we were back in the same area again. Then the boiler inspector he was working with got offered a job with Hartford Steam Boiler (HSB) and they asked him if he knew anyone else that was qualified and he gave them Damons name. He called me up and gave me the good news of the new job. He didn't tell me about it before hand cause he knew I was looking for something different and didn't want to compete with me for the job (smart on his part, I was more qualified, lol). To help me out though, he said they were still looking for more people and gave me the contact info. I faxed a resume from my work the next day, interviewed a few days later and gave my 2 week notice the day after that. Never looked back, it's been an awesome career.
So we were going through the training to get out inspector commissions, car pooling into Minneapolis everyday, when a change in the company prompted lay offs. Here we are, newbies, unqualified and saw the writing on the wall. But things don't always go as expected. Turns out HSB had an opening in southern IL and they offered that to Damon instead of him staying in MN as was the original plan. I still got my territory up in the Fargo/Grand Forks area and life went on.
We both changed employers a few times, always staying in this field though. And here we are over 20 years later, still friends, in a sense still co-workers, and tangled up in each others lives. I helped build the 400 sbc in his Camaro he still has. He helped me do lots of stuff on my truck and other cars from back then. Now he's teaching my kids how to shoot (He's a certified instructor).
Well that's a lot of words. Hope I didn't bore you all too much. That's it for day 2.
Sunset that evening...
