russellviii

This airport is huge.

When I arrived in Beijing we had to wait for about two hours to get through immigration. For some reason the immigration line is not well laid out, like it is at other airports.

There is no real “line” to stand in to wait your turn. People just bunch up into a big mass and just sort of “squeeze out” one at a time to go through immigration.

It’s a very slow process, and very frustrating as you watch other people who came in after you did manage to make it through way ahead of you. It’s also very hot waiting in line with hundreds of other people jammed together.

I know that it’s only an airport. The thing that I like about Memphis is that it’s not been too terribly crowded the two times that I’ve been there. But the thing that I like most about it is that it has a great place to get some pretty good barbecue. When passing though Memphis I try to remember to arrive hungry.

One of the teachers at R9’s high school takes a group of students, parents, and whomever on various trips around the world. This summer the trip is to China. We’re going to go to Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

I’ll be going with R9 and one of my daughters. It will be about 10 days in June.

I will be going to Japan this summer as a part of my MBA program. We will be going to Tokyo and Nagoya.

I’m pretty excited about it.

In the past we have had weveral exchange students from Japan who have stayed with us. I’m hoping to meet up with at least one of them.

Stopped here on the way to NC to see my brother and his family.

If ToddieM can claim this one, then by golly, I’m going to make a connection here and bag this one for myself too.

Perhaps I had just gotten myself a bit too psyched up for this one.

I had read about the Battle of the Crater, where Union forces had secretly tunneled beneath Confederate lines, packed the whole thing full of explosives and detonated it. The resulting blast shook the ground violently. Huge pillars of debris sprang up into the air. Men and equipment were thrown around violently. As a direct result of the blast, 268 men were killed, two cannons, weighing in excess of 1000 pounds each were tossed effortlessly into the distance.

The blast left a crater nearly 300 feet long, over 100 feet wide, and 30 feet deep.

Following the confusion of the blast, Union soldiers attacked Confederate positions. Not thinking, many of them jumped into the crater where they became trapped, easy targets for Confederate soldiers.

The battle was brutal and bloody. It created an amazing story, one of the stories of Civil War battles that I find most intriguing of all.

The unfortuate thing is that seeing the actral crater itself was so anticlimactic. The crater has filled in over the years through natural sloughing off due to erosion and perhaps other factores as well. The once might crater now looks like little more than a low spot in the lawn. It is a mere shadow of its former once-great self.

I’ll arrive in the Richmond area on Monday afternoon. My meeting is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. My plan is to zip down see the Petersburg Battlefield first thing in the morning, and have a look around. I can then hurry back up to my hotel, change clothes, grab some lunch and make it to my meeting.

I was always amazed at the story of tunneling under the city and trying to blow it up. I figure that as long as I’m this close, and have a prime opportunity, I need to take advantage of it. I’m eager to learn more about it and to see what is left of the crater.

I had a meeting outside of Richmond and flew into the airport there. I’ll be back there again next week for another meeting. Hopefully I can see a few things while I’m out there this time.

A friend of mine who lives in Boulder goes to the same church that the Ramseys attended when they lived in Boulder. He gave us directions to the house. It was located just a short distance away from the hotel where I was staying.

I went with another traveler. We drove by, stopped and looked. It was kind of eerie. It was dark, but we tried to take a couple of pictures anyway.

The neighborhood was different than I had imagined. It was a nice neighborhood, upscale, but somewhat older. The houses are large, but not palatious.

The house appeared to be empty. I imagine that people are probably not lining up in droves to buy it.