Hi there? I have been MIA for a long time. Lots of changes have happened since !y last visit: had a couple of back surgeries,finally got on Social Security Disability (first visit to their doctor I had a walker, a wound vac and an IV in my arm and was declared work ready...) Been keeping busy. Glad to be back.

Hey Darlene, Good to hear from you! It's been a long time (5 and a half years or thereabouts?) Hope you are on the mend! Glad to have you back on the forum.

Incidentally, My last tour (that's a change - since you've been here, I left Okinawa in 2016 and spent 2.5 years in Quantico before retiring from the Marine Corps) was close to Fredericksburg so I was in the middle of a lot of Civil War history. I didn't see as much as I liked, but I did take a great tour of the Chancellorsville Battlefield. That was a great experience. I've got a lot of pictures, but I need to transfer them from Google photos to Irista since you can't openly share Google Photos links anymore. (I hate Google!)

Incidentally, living between Fredericksburg and DC I find one thing kind of surprising. It would seem that if you want to get to Fredericksburg or any point south of that, you have in 2019 the same problem Burnsides had 157 years ago - crossing the Rappahannock. With I-95 usually more of a parking lot than a thoroughfare and Route 1 (AKA Jefferson Davis Highway - 95's paralleling older brother) normally just as bad but with traffic lights, it would probably be faster to walk from DC and sneak across the U.S. Ford.

I post some links to my Civil War tourism when I get them uploaded somewhere more link-friendly than Google.

Glad to have you back!

I just checked and my Picasa Web Albums (now Google Photo Archive) still works and you can link to my albums. And so here are my trips to . . .

Chancellorsville

Camp Sumter (Andersonville)

Fort Pulaski

Some are way older, but still pretty interesting. There are some pictures of much younger Capt Todd in there. If you check the info on the pictures it says 2010, but I was at 2d Tank Battalion on that trip and that was 2006.

If you want to check over a large body of pictures I've taken in my duty stations, museums and other points of interest look here. Album Archive doesn't put them in order by date so that is annoying, but not much you can do about that.

Hey Darlene:  Wow, good to have you back. Hope you are feeling much better. Sounds like you've gone through some hell in the past few years. 

Capt O, thanks for responding to her post. Gee, almost feels like old times. Oh how I miss those initial days where everyone would join in and we'd keep a discussion going  and going. And of course, miss the banterings with our dear WWII veterans. Things just aren't the same, anymore...

Good to see my old stomping grounds of Chancelorsville. Last time I was there we had a tour of the "house"(it's actually the farm office) where Jackson died. We were there at night by lantern light. Kind of took you back in time. My favorite tour was tracing the Booth escape rte.