Dahhh! I did not read the message correctly that you'd re-posted as a sort of One Year Anniversary tribute to an incredible adventure of sightseeing and friendship building. So, it has taken me about 90 minutes to cover your adventures.
I felt like such a dope once I realized that the thread was a year old and you might not "know" that I had written responses to aspects of the "Incredible Visit" of the three forumites and the vicarious other forumites who went with you every step of the way. When I got to the last page and read the above I realized that the thread was once again "live".
All of this simply exemplifies the infinite beauty of internet. (Back in 1994-95, I was part of a traveling forum that did "Service to the Citizen" forums around the country. The forum presenters were all of the Internet Dignitaries of the era and then there was me - a lowlife luddite who was invited and designated by Forester Research of Boston to be the voice of local government working feverishly to harness the power of the internet for use by "the citizens of the world" to have voice and access to reality (rather than relying on the 4th Estate to deliver what is or is not happening across the globe.) In 1990, I had defeated three recommendations by the National Taxpayers Association to tax the internet. It was viewed as a virtual goldmine for governments to gain huge revenues by taxing it. I represented West Publishing Company (then the largest legal publishers in the world due to its release of WestLaw, an internet -based search site that paginated all laws and court cases in the world) and we would have been the largest operation tapped for that revenue stream. I argued that the Internet had to develop unbridled by laws that interfered with free market place development and that taxation would, without a doubt, corrupt and limit such development. I beat the proclamations so soundly that the NIIAC established rules to ban taxation. They have tried since but it remains protected by Congressional action.) Bill Gates (who had not yet launched Internet Explorer - Marc Andreessen, the founder of Mosaic - which he used my team's bot we aptly named "spyders" to develop and co-found the first web browser, Netscape - is who was the presenter who explained and discussed web exploration as an educational and informational tool that had just 6 years earlier been released public (as originally, it was developed for and used exclusively by research educational institutions and the military operations of NATO) use. My website, NorthStar, was the beta-test site for Internet Explorer. Bill Gates would talk on and on about the virtual cross-country date whereby a couple would both go to a movie (East Coast person matinee and West Coast person early show) then they could both go home and "chat" about the picture they'd just seen "together". He "knew" that it had the potential to bring together unlikely searchers of souls, news, government, relationships, etc. Up to then, I only "knew" the aol chat rooms!! (And most of the time they were local and led to a satisfying encounter but nothing long-term!!)
I thought he was dreaming. But, his dream has come to fruition and this site and your trip are the lasting and enduring reality to his "dream".
I didn't mean to go into all of that - but it IS the coming to fruition of what he envisioned whereas I had a limited view of its value for being a tool citizens could use to pay taxes, get a license, check out laws, edicts and rules that govern them, blah, blah, blah. See, a luddite through and through.
Thanks, again, Mikey! It is nice to have a face to some of those who here share their wit, wisdom, encouragement, compassion, dreams, insults and jabs with one another as if they are one big, united family.
t.
