Our New Sailor

On Monday evening before Thanksgiving we started our 13 hour drive out to Waukegan, IL to attend our youngest son Christopher's graduation from Navy Boot Camp. He's a 'nuke' which apparently is also synonymous with 'geek' in the Navy. He'll be heading off for his A-school as soon as some paperwork gets cleared up.

The graduation ceremony was impressive. There was a band, a parade of the flags of the fifty states, an honor guard complete with tossing rifles around, and a review. A captain from the office of the deputy secretary of Naval Operations gave a stirring and brief congratulations and reminded all the sailors that aptitude and attitude were two of the most important qualities. You can work on both and those who did would be very successful.

We hung around in the are for Thanksgiving and the day after taking our sailor shopping and to a couple of movies. We went to "Bolt" just because it sounded cute and it was much better than we expected. We ate Thanksgiving dinner at a sparsely populated small restaurant named Anastasia's which featured among other things a brandy flaming cheese appetizer called "Saganaki." Good stuff! Then on Saturday morning at 5 a.m. we rose for the long drive home. Both ways we were fortunate to hit Chicago at times when the traffic was light which seems to hardly ever happen around Chicago.