Ok, Guys and Girls.

For Christmas I want to give a fellow FTE'r a Ford Performance Racing (FPR) Polo T-Shirt.
This is an item which you cannot get outside Australia or New Zealand. The neighbours certainly aren't going to have a shirt like this

Now, what you need to do is...
Put down where you would like to travel to Internationally, and a good reason for it. The most interesting place and reason wins.
You can also tell us an interesting story about a time you have had overseas.
On the 1st of December I shall go through them all, and decide a winner.

Now, this competition is open to all FTE members, whether you are an International Chapter member or not.
BUT if you are a registered International Chapter member (click the link in my signature if you want to join), AND reside outside the US or Canada you will also recieve an FPR hat.

 

To me
Down under has lots of appeal. It's English speaking, exotic, remote, filled with crazy looking plants and animals. Many Australians combine the best character qualities from around the globe: hardiness, humor and cordiality.

Aussies are justifiably famous for outgoing character.The Australians are masters of a vast, isolated, largely desert continent and their outlook shows independence of spirit and loads of aptitude. When the vast interior of your country is an inhospitable outback, then your ring of vibrant coastal cities are treated like causes for celebration, and for visitors this feeling is infectious.

In no specific order of importance:
1) I prefer Kangaroos to Sheep
2) Beer in the "Land of Oz" beats that of the US
3) I can understand what Auzzies are saying
4) I have already driven on the other side of the road in England and it's just as comfortable as Home in Canada.
5) Meeting the shielas at the Australian Pavillion at Expo 86 in Vancouver sold me on the Ladies of Oz.
6) I share the commonwealth with Auzzies
7) Always wanted to walk up to an auzzie and ask about a "Kookaburro" Crazy Donket in America
8) Who wouldn't want to visit Austrailia ?
9) I would like to meet Paul Hogan & Greg Norman and trade stories about Knives and golf *****
10) To Swallow the complete contents of a Home grown bottle of the Golden Throat Charmer.
10A) To meet the BigF350 and go dousing for Beer

 

I would like to travel internationally by ship, with the trip being the destination. I want to start on the west coast of the US, hop a container ship to mainland Asia, then to Japan, then Australia, South Africa, work my way up the western coast, and travel to Germany, England, maybe hit Iceland and Greenland on the way back to the US. I doubt it'll ever happen, I can't imagine how many thousands of dollars this trip would cost, even going cheap on freight ships.

 

Well, the one time I went out of the country, I went with my parents to Germany to visit with my sister's foreign exchange host family. My sister went to Wagenfeld, Germany {near Hamburg} on a foreign exchange program, and lived with a farm family for a year. It so happens we also grew up on a farm, so that part wasn't too strange to us. They raised dairy cattle, and the ways they did things, equipment they used and all was very interesting. There were a lot of differences, but also a lot of similarities. I attended the school that the children went to for a day, and it really brought home how much it would help if I were to be able to understand their language, but also just how much alike we are. We toured on to Bavaria for a week, which was pretty cool, seeing all the castles, including the one Walt Disney used for his logo as well as several movies. I got to see Switzerland from across the lake, since my sister had forgotten her passport back in Wagenfeld. I did get to see Amsterdam, and have seen the Atlantic from both the east and west sides now. We also toured Frankfurt, which happens to be the birthplace of my current wife, who had moved to the States about the time I was overthere... I did this in 1984, and still remember much of it quite well.

As for where i would Like to go, out of the US, Austrailia is probably one of the top places, just because it is quite unique with the wildlife and lifestyles as well, but no so different that I can't understand, not to mention the poeple there seem to be quite friendly, in the dealings I have had with citizens down under. My wife would like to go there, but she really has her heart set first on going back to her homeland, just to see what it is like to more adult eyes. With some of the friends I have made online, it would also be interesting to meet some in Britain as well, (Adele, I haven't forgotten you!!!)

 

Well, I have only one wish,go back to Bien Hoa Vietnam to exorcise the phantoms that haunt me.
Saigon

 

I have never travelled outside a couple state radius. I and my family dont have the money to do extravagant trips and i really dont feel the need. But if i did have the chance, i sure would like to visit egypt and the pyramids. They are really cool to me and i think it would be cool to see them

Matt

 

My wife and myself have been to Vegas(who doesn't LOVE that town), and a couple of spots in the Carribean...Cancun, Jamaica, and the Caymen Islands(highly recommend). But my real interests would be to go to some Western Europe countries like Germany...alot of history there and not just the bad stuff, and Italy...of coarse to see the roots of my wifes family and she has several relatives which would make accommedations a whole lot cheaper considering the cost. And for my all time favorite place to see would be New Zealand...nothing but good reviews from friends who travelled to other side of the world, very friendly and polite people and such diverse scenery from one end of the island to other...looks like you could lose yourself in the beauty and seclusion.

 

I’ll give it a burl.

I had to really fossick to get this to work and the International Chapters going to give me a gobful for hacking their language. Fair Dinkum?



Gut sind Ostblockmädchen ich graben wirklich jene Artkleidung stylish, die sie tragen
E as meninas do sul com a maneira que falam

Excitam minhas emoções quando eu estou para baixo lá

Le figlie del coltivatore del Midwest realmente vi rendono la sensibilità debole


Ja Pohjoinen apulainen avulla elämäntapa he suudelma He elatus heidän poikaystävä harras aikaa ehtoo


Я желаю они все смогло быть california….

Ik wens dit zij allen Californië zouden kunnen zijn….

Επιθυμώ ότι όλοι θα μπορούσαν να είναι κορίτσια Καλιφόρνιας


ang kanluran mamaybay may ang sunshine at ang batang babae lahat kumuha pagayon tanned

Je creuse un bikini français sur l'île d'Hawaï

Poupées par un arbre de paume dans le sable

EGO been totus inter is valde magnus universitas Quod EGO seen totus pius of puella

Yeah , tamen EGO couldn't exspecto impetro tergum in civitas Tergum ut cutest puella obvius universitas


Я желаю они все смогло быть california….

Ik wens dit zij allen Californië zouden kunnen zijn….

Επιθυμώ ότι όλοι θα μπορούσαν να είναι κορίτσια Καλιφόρνιας

Я желаю они все смогло быть california….

(Flikarna , flikarna , flikarna yeah JAG gräva den)

Ik wens dit zij allen Californië zouden kunnen zijn….

(Jeune fille , jeune fille , jeune fille yeah MOI fouiller les)

Jeg ønsker de alle det kan tenkes California

(Mädchen, Mädchen, Mädchen yeah grabe ich)

Dood, why can’t our babes rock, like they do in the land of fruits and nuts
(I’d hit it!)



(If this looks like chicken scratch on your browser with 98, hit: start – Settings - control panel – add/remove programs – windows settings and click on multi language support. Then it’ll look like chicken scratch with proper form.)

I wonder what this will do for FTE exposure with Google searches from strange places?

 

What's with the Yellow Girl ... Not Me ?

Reference : Jeune Fille

 

Oh, I thought you ment an "Ether" story, I have plenty of them, I lost my eyebroughs and mustash to a Hemmet in Germany thanks to a damn ether bottle. LOL!

I have a few more about winter in Bosnia, none of them fun, trust me.

Just a hint, try going to take a #2 at 30 below.......LOL! Nothing but a flash light and a rough houghn(sp) outhouse and the newest issue of playboy. What you get is a bank of snow, full doors and a bunch of guys shouting between stalls. Of all things, Basketball. On top of that, not an ounce of wipe left.

Talk about a bad winter.

 

“I have a dream…”

Well, I like to think of it more as a goal, really. My dream (okay, okay, goal then!) is to sail the world…single-handed, in a relatively small boat, say on the order of 38-40 feet long. To explain a bit more about this crazy(?) idea, let me give you some background:

I’ve had a bit of the wanderlust for most of my life. As a child, my paternal grandparents did a lot of traveling and always saved me coins and bills from their travels. I still have every one of them. It sparked in me an interest to know what more is out there, beyond my own relatively limited horizon. To see the world, and to see how others we share this great globe with have adapted to their corner of it.

I’ve always had an interest in history as well. Yes, I live in a great country, but every one of us here had our origins somewhere else. Even the Native Americans whose ancestors, the theory goes, came across the Bearing Strait on the Land bridge from Asia.

I’m an American, a resident of the Great Melting Pot. Our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in world!

I find myself fascinated by the art, history and culture of other lands, and wish to increase my knowledge and understanding of other ways of life in order to help me to appreciate how it is that I have arrived in exactly this point in history. To stand in great and fabulous places and imagine all that have stood before me in that same spot, equally in awe of the history connected to it…I could go on and wax philosophic, but I don’t think any of us wants that. It probably wouldn’t be pretty!

At this point in my life I would have to consider myself moderately well-traveled. At age 15 I went to Fairbanks, Alaska for two weeks to visit my sister. While there we took a trip to Mt. McKinley and camped for a few days, and rode a bus to the base of the mountain. What an awesome spectacle that was! Denali…20,320 feet! I have never forgotten the majesty of that place.

On the way back to Fairbanks, we stopped off at the Malamute saloon…

“A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon…” from “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” by Robert Service, my favorite poet, as well as my mother’s.

Under the midnight sun back in Fairbanks we took in the Eskimo Olympics. Very interesting, and a fascinating look at another culture that was quite different from anything I’d ever experienced at that time.


Two weeks after that trip ended I was onboard a 747 winging my way across the Atlantic to…Sweden, where I spent the next 10 months as an exchange student. There was so much about that experience that I still hold close to me, including a friendship that has lasted for almost 30 years. I lived in the northern part of the country with a rather atypical Swedish family who were wonderful to me, a teenager alone in a foreign land. I dined on moose and smörgos, learned to drive too fast on snowy roads and saw the Northern Lights on a frigid Arctic evening.

Of course, there’s much more to this tale but that’s another story…

At the end of the school year my parents came over to meet me, and we set out together for a month of touring Europe by car. We spent Midsummer’s Eve in Norway, stayed with family in Denmark, visited the town in Germany where my sister was born, and much more. We spent the last few days of our trip in England, staying with a rather well-known English musician who was a family friend (no, not Mick Jagger or Elton John…not that well-known!)

Ahh, Jolly Olde England…so much of what and who we are comes from there. I can trace ancestors back to the British Isles for hundreds of years, on both sides. Another fascinating place, and our time there was way too short. Mostly we stayed in and around London, but there was just so much to see and so little time to see it in. I was on the one hand loathe to leave, but on the other eager to get home after my long absence.


I returned to Sweden for a 6-week visit some two years later, but have not made it back since. Someday…


In 1998 my family took a 19-day trip to Europe, the first one for my sister since her infancy and her first look at the town in Germany where she was born. This was my first time in France, Switzerland and Italy, as well as revisiting Germany and Luxembourg. A brief stop in Liechtenstein and a quick jaunt through the corner of Austria almost counts, right?

I won’t go into any more detail here as this travelogue is getting quite long enough already. Suffice it to say that I long to return one day, to see places that I have not yet seen and to see once again the places that hold a dear spot in my heart, along with the memories of some of the warmest and most wonderful people I have ever met.



To do this on a boat, taking my time and really getting to know these people and places, is one of the most wonderful experiences I can imagine. To set forth from these shores, westward to the Hawaiian Islands and from there to Australia (where I happen to know someone…perhaps he’d invite me by for a visit!)

For me, no trip to the Land Down Under would be complete without a trip into the interior, to Alice Springs. To travel the Outback, to meet the Abos, yes, it’s all on my to-do list. I figure a year or so in Australia would just about do it…then, westward, ever westward I would sail. To Africa, and then up to the Mediterranean where I would spend another year and more. Greece, Italy, Spain…there is so much to see and do, so much history to learn and relive. Many side trips inland would be in order, including a trip to Prague to see the land that gave birth to my great-great grandfather (well, one of them anyway).

Sailing out of the Med through the Straits of Gibraltar I would head north again, France’s west coast by way of Portugal and up to the Baltic Sea, and my triumphant return to Sweden by sea, under full sail. A good deal of time would of course have to be spent here, with my Swedish brother and his family. A tearful farewell and then it’s on to the British Isles for another extended stay, and then the Atlantic crossing to home. Of course, I would still be a continent away at this point, so after I’d had my fill of the east coast I would turn southward to the Bahamas, Haiti, Jamaica and eventually the Panama Canal. After the canal crossing I would finally be on the last leg to home, by way of Mexico’s west coast.

So there you have it: where I’ve been and were I’d like to go, and why.

Aren’t you glad I kept it short?!

 

I thought about this for a while. A story. Something that is really close to me, and has a time perspective to past and the future. Here we go then. Not the great american novel, however, more a flow of thoughts.

In early 1985 I was eagerly waiting for my 15th birthday, since that provided me with a slight hope that dad would approve my idea (in fact he did not) of a little scooter to ride around. Humble eh ? Well in Finland you have to be 18 for the driver's license, so at the age of 14 you don't look forward to cars yet, except in your dreams.

It was February or so and I came home from school that day, only to discover news which would actually shape my life for years to come. It turned out that dad had been commissioned to participate in the U.S. Army War College special program for international officers. Now this would mean in practice that our family would move to Pennsylvania for over a year. Now just try to imagine what a 14-year old thinks about that, being an aspiring car enthusiast with a special interest in U.S. made cars. Whoah I was ecstatic !

At the time I was far too young to really appreciate the meaning of that to my life and development as a person. Of course I made the most out of it, was lucky enough to end up in Carlisle, PA where some of the major car events are held, rode my bicycle to 1/8 mile drags in nearby towns, oh boy I had a ball. I even authored an article which was published in a finnish car magazine. It featured the Corvettes at Carlisle event.

Of course the year at U.S. Army War College was special and privileged in itself. We got to familiarize ourselves with people from 40 different countries, and my dad had a professionally interesting year there. I went to Carlisle High School and had a chance to see the real America. This is one of the important lessons I had. It broadened my view on the world and gave me pleasant memories from what I call "My America". As some may have noticed, there are a lot of superstitions in Europe about the U.S. and most if not all of them are horribly wrong, or skewed to say the least. Lesson learned - go out there and find out for yourself.

When I speak about the "My America" it is about the plumber next door, the car repair shop owner across the street, ordinary everyday life and culture.

Years passed by and I grew up. My perception of the world and life matured, but I never lost those memories. With age, I began to have a deeper and more complex appreciation of the U.S. culture. My current house has a number of little details in which I cherish those times. Our cars tend to be from around the mid eighties and of course they're U.S. made.

I recently bought a new mailbox and of course I found a genuine Ohio-made" U.S. Postmaster approved" one. At my hometown's hardware store here in Finland. Every time I go to pick up mail, I recall the 1404 Pheasant Dr. So. mailbox we had in Carlisle.

I do keep occasional contact with Grace, who was a very good friend to me back then. She has 10 (!) children these days and lives in Maryland.

I follow U.S. issues almost on a daily basis (Internet makes it easy). In the past I used to go down to Helsinki Train Station and buy U.S. newspapers there.

I had so much fun and good times, that after we came back home in 1986, I already realized I would always have two nationalities inside me. I would always be the highschool freshman in my memories. It has been 20 years now and to get to the point of this trip down the memory lane, I would like to and definitely will one day visit Carlisle. I just want to make sure I have enough budget to stay there for two full weeks. At the very latest in 2010 I try to make it, hopefully dad can come too. It will then be 25 years since our first day in Carlisle.

I now fully understand that the chance to see the U.S. and the fact that we had a lot of exposure to different cultures while there, improved my comprehension and perception of the world. Of course this might be as true had we gone to Germany for example back then, but the point is to see the world and learn from it.

And like I have earlier said, I get kicks from thinking that there must be somewhere in the world a guy like me. Driving back home from work in a F-150 pickup with EFI 300 & 5-spd. Thinking about what to get from the grocery store for dinner and whether the Aerostar front wheel hub should be replaced today or on the weekend. Is boss going to give me the raise or not. Should I buy new tires now or will these be good for this winter. You know what I mean. Around the world we pickup truck guys are pretty much the same.

 

For me,the one place id like to travel to would be to iraq right now. I have 2 of my best friends in the entire world there right now.closer then brothers to me. Not a single day goes by where i dont sit here and worry about them when i hear there were causality on the news. They write me letters and send me pictures about the horrors they deal with every minute of every day,just unthinkable things they have to see and deal with. Of all the places in the world i could visit right now,of all the options id have,id travel to that desert,go up to each and every soilder look then straight in the eye and say...thank you.

 

i want to visit the nation of my grandparents who came over by ship, the Czech Republic. after visiting there, i want to swing by Parma, Italy, because my last name is Parma, and well, i just think that would be pretty dern cool. i know, its confusing, i'm Czech, but the name seems italian....i dunno, thats my plan and i'm stickin to it. i want to do all of this by car on my own timeline. just out for the fun of it, no set plans, just going where i want when i want. maybe by the time i actually get there, France will have kicked its own **** and be someplace decent to go to without worry your gonna get your car torched. anywho, Czech Rep, and Italy. i'd like to also hit up Australia, England, Ireland, deep inside mexico for the Aztec ruins, pyramids, and countless other places. maybe some day...

 

I've been some strange places and seen some strange things, but last year I spent 6 weeks in Japan. While in Osaka riding in a cab I saw something that just blew my mind. We were driving around alot of huge skyscrapers when I looked up and saw a Super Highway/Freeway going straight through the middle of one of the skyscrapers. No kidding right thru the middle, the building had a hole in it and cars were flying right through it! Wish I had a picture to post. Japan is a very strange place, in Kyoto there is a city beneath the city, you can walk from street to street underground all the while shopping and dining, or taking the subways.