It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we�ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say

"We never pay any one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"

---Rudolph Kipling, (courtesy Best of the Web)

Yes, it's been one year since we started liberating Iraq, and also it's been 59 years since the Carrier Franklin was hit by bombs and my father died. Today they opened the Franklin Room on the USS Hornet. My brother came from New York, my sister from Seattle, and various vets came from Hawaii and Texas, Southern California and nearby.

We went down to Alameda early, to try to sell some softballs, but the place is closed. Oh, well. En route we proved life is timing, when we went into the rest area just after 5 busloads of junior high school kids, en route to the Exploratorium and the SF Zoo. I looked at that loooooong line and decided I really didn't need to go that badly!

After we struck out (haha) with the softballs, we went caching. We went to Crown Beach. We had to slow down a little till a crocodile of Kindergarteners came by, but then Rich spied the cache. We looked at a LOT of turtles in the pond, and saw all the ground squirrels, which is what I remember from the last time we were here. Then I tried for the bathroom... yeah, right. It was being cleaned. The one at the other end of the beach was out of order. Fortunately, Rich spied a city park with a restroom, so my day was OK.

There's a multi-cache in 7 parts, with twist-ties for the clues. We walked over to the first one, then decided to drive the rest, but first pick one up over by the ferry terminal. We then drove to parts two and three. Along the way Rich was impatient with an old driver ahead of us, but I noticed the "USS Franklin CV-13" license plate frame, and knew why they were there. This made me antsy to get to the ship pretty soon, so we broke for lunch. Then we had a little time, so we went for part four, and then maybe we could do five, by which time we'd pretty well gone around the island and were close to the Hornet again, so we picked up six and the last part was right on our way. We got to the Hornet about 12:45. I saw some people I met in Pittsburgh. They hadn't seen my brother this morning, though they had lunch with him last night. It turned out, though, that he was in the Franklin Room, down the stairs. One of the vets took me down, a lot more carefully than he would have done it when he was 20!

The exhibits are great. I got credit, even though I did nothing, as the "Allan C. Edmands family." My sister appeared. We admired the planes and talked, and went out to the fantail where the formal dedication took place. When they were talking about doing it, they initially had the "Pledge of Elegance" in the program, but we did the old Allegiance pledge after all. Shucks. My brother and a nephew of another veteran threw a wreath over.

After this we watched a nice film consisting of interviews with Franklin survivors. We went to dinner with two of the veteran couples, to Jack London Square, where Rich and I picked up one more cache before dinner and another after we said goodbye to everyone. What a nice day this was!