In July, 2003, my family and I went back home to Newfoundland for the first time in about 5 years. It was one of the most idyllic vacations we spent together. It could not have gone better. This year we bought a digital camera because, let's face it, I need one. To create these stories, one of my main hobbies, I used to have to borrow a camera, and that didn't work out very well. There were many times I needed one and couldn't borrow one.

It was probably the best purchase I made this year next to the vacation itself. I took somewhere around a thousand pictures, and the quality of the camera's optics and my moderate experience with point-n-shoot photography made for a well-documented trip that will bring back the memories with sharp clarity.

My only inconvenience was in getting the images to CD, as I didn't have a laptop, and only had 150Megs of storage space on my camera memory cards. But as I found, CD-writers are not hard to come by in Newfoundland. I borrowed the use of no less than three computers while home in order to store my images onto CD. (So thanks, David and Linda, Wilf, and Bill and Lisa.) Imagine the developing cost if I had used film! Over nine hundred pictures!

While preparing for this trip, I knew that I had to bring one thing with me that most people would not bring - a GI Joe. On a previous vacation I brought my Adventure Team Commander figure (a Hasbro Robert E. Lee head on an ERTL Top Cop body) with me and took shots of him in various locations in New Hampshire. I have photos of him at the top of Mount Washington. However, I used a film camera, and I still don't have that film developed yet. I was going to make it sort of a running gag - at every family vacation take a few shots of the Commander wherever we went.

So I knew that in Newfoundland I would come across some of the most breathtaking scenery there is, and places I don't have access to here in Massachusetts. My primary aim was to have the Commander off-site somewhere when an urgent call comes in for the Adventure Team. This is a formula I used in my past Adventure Team stories. The Commander would be at the beach, in the forest, etc. I wanted to have him in various locations in Newfoundland and Atlantic Canada as well, to use as cut-away shots in future AT stories as he's apprised of the current situation (and believe me, I will use those!)

But I ended up doing more. One one of the last days I was in Newfoundland, while my family was barbecueing at my uncle's house in King's Point, (large impromptu family gathering) I shot my story "High Mountain Retrieval" at Rattling Brook, just a few miles from his house. The landscape was so beautiful I had to do a full story there.

But when I returned, I found that I had a lot of shots of the Commander in and around Newfoundland, and not-so-coincidentally, several of those locations were former army outposts and the War Memorial in St. John's.

Still, I had no idea for a story, just a lot of random shots.

On November 4, 2003 (just last week as I write this) it occurred to me that in exactly a week would be Remembrance Day, (as it is known in Canada.) It is a national holiday and everyone wears a plastic poppy to symbolize the poppies that grow on Flanders Fields where so many soldiers are buried in Europe. And in one instant I had my story.

One little detail that helped was that recently I had purchased two "Viet Nam Memorial" GI Joe sets at Toys R Us for $5.00 each. My daughter, for some reason, really really wanted one of those, so I got one for her birthday, and one for me. In this set was a tri-fold American flag, traditionally given to the families of US soldiers killed in action. It was the last piece of the puzzle - the one prop to rule them all.

As often happens with me the story formed itself in an instant. Kind of like a "Big Bang." It's as if it was already there, and I just triggered it. And as it was a series of random vacation shots, I thought the best way to display it was as a photo album. I wondered how I would caption them. I thought I would simply type the text in below the photo in a HTML table, but I never liked that idea. I'd done it a couple times and the result is less immediate. Associating text underneath the photo with the photo is harder. There is a distinct disconnection between the text and the photo. I could have gone with the normal comic-book-like boxed captions, but it hit me - if I were putting together photos, and was planning to caption them, I would simply use Post-It notes. So it seemed to me that this would work if I could make it look like the captions were scrawled in pen. I happened to have several "hand-written" type fonts handy and I used the one that looked most like my idea of the Commander's hand-writing.

First, let me admit this: This story is not autobiographical. I've been asked, so I thought I would clear that up. However, some parts are. The Commander grew up in Springdale. The assumption from the story is that he grew up there after his father died in action, to a single parent. This is not my story. I did grow up in Springdale, but I had a huge family. I was, however, the product of a single parent, but I was raised by my grandparents. It was the perfect town to grow up in. The hills were my playground.

But I never knew anyone who died in the war. Or any war. I didn't know of any one in my family who served, though some may have without my knowledge.

But in my mind, my AT Commander's back story had to be military in nature. I've already established that the AT was formed from the military GI Joe organization that came before it. It seemed logical that my Commander was the son of a American serviceman and a Newfoundland woman. I know several people who came from exactly such a union. Many Newfoundland women married US servicemen and moved to the US. In my Commander's story his father died before they moved to the US, so he grew up in his mother's hometown. All fiction of course.

What isn't fiction is the amount of action Newfoundland saw during the war. German U-Boats made direct assaults on Newfoundland, sinking vessels. Being the first contact point between North America and Europe, Newfoundland was right in the middle of it all.

The Adventure Team in my stories is inherently a world operation, not exclusively an American one, and the Commander's multi-national origins would make sense.

The small pond pictured on page one is a pond named after my family. My family swam there, fished there, it was quite the center of activities on a summer's day. In my own teenage years my grandfather fished for trout there frequently and I learned fly-fishing there. I used to watch in fascination as beavers walked right up to my grandfather, and he would talk to them.

I have no idea if they talked back, but I'll tell you this - they never talked to me.

One night while fly-fishing under the moon, I saw a bat fly down and take my dry fly and fly off with it. No, I didn't hook the bat. He dropped it as soon as he realized my deception.

The ghost-village on the island of Three Arms exists. There are some more modern buildings there, erected by people who still use the island to store lobster traps, and for other utilitarian reasons. But there is no longer any sign of the dwellings, and it's grown over with high grasses. However, my family did not originate there. One branch of my wife's famliy did live in that general area, however. So it wasn't a stretch to include it all in my Commander's story.

While driving around King's Point, my family and I went to Rattling Brook, a very tall waterfall that had recently had a nice wooden stairway built up to a swimming hole at the base of the falls. I'd seen it before, but this time it inspired me to write a story based at the falls. High Mountain Retrieval was the result. While my family was having a mini-reunion barbecue, I was up at Rattling Brook with my Commander and my Camera shooting a mini story.

I had a pretty good idea what the basic story was, but I had no specific text in mind. I mention in that story that there was a Canadian Coast Guard ship docked in Springdale. I said that because it had been known to happen. However, what's interesting is that there was a Coast Guard ship docked in Springdale. Here it is:

At the wharf seen on the left...	A Canadian Coast Guard vessel.

Fort Amherst in St. John's still remains one of my favorite places to spend an afternoon. I lived in St. John's for about 12 years and in that time I used to go to Fort Amherst to relax, read, just hang out and enjoy the solitude and the sea air. It's never packed with tourists. I was sad to see that the tunnels I used to roam are now closed to the public because of deterioration. That happened in the past 7 years or so since I left.

Signal Hill is a must-see for any tourist or local. It is a gorgeous look-out and one of the busiest tourist spots in Newfoundland. I highly recommend it.

The War Memorial is an elegant structure right in the heart of downtown, a multi-tiered marble platform that links Duckworth Street and Water Street. It is also one of my favorite places there. So while I was walking by with my Commander and my daughter, I had an inkling of where my story may go, and thought I should have this military man honor the dead by visiting the Memorial.

Trinity and Brigus were just stops on our own family tour, but each of them means a lot to us, as we have visited each frequently while we lived in Newfoundland. Brigus is still one of my favorite little towns in Newfoundland.

The Whale Tour was spectacular. If you're ever in Newfoundland it is not to be missed. Bay Bulls is about twenty minutes south of St. John's. I have always toured with the O'Briens there. They have a long family tradition of knowledgeable and entertaining touring, and it seems the whales know them and always gather around to greet their passengers. The little calf in that picture at one point raised his head to the surface and rolled so his eye could see us. He was very playful. Also on the tour we saw Minke whales, the tropical sunfish, as you know (quite a rare sight!) and over at the Witless Bay Bird Sancutary besides puffins we saw kittiwakes, razor-billed awks and what Newfoundlanders call "turrs", but are more commonly known as murres. During a short period each year there is a hunting season for murres in Newfoundland, but not on the sanctuary island. Killing a puffin at any time is a serious offense and can bring a huge fine or jail time, so I don't recommend that.

The day after touring Witless Bay, my friend took me up in a small Piper Cherokee PA-28-140 and we flew over Bay Bulls, where we had toured the previous day. We went out over Bell Island, south to Bay Bulls, then northward along the rocky coast past Cape Spear, Fort Amherst and Signal Hill, and back to the airport. It was an amazing experience.

Sadly, we didn't get time to visit Cape Spear, which also has tunnels and old bunkers, and some well-preserved guns. One used to just lie on the grass and we used to sit on it and climb over it. I don't know if it's still there, and I didn't get a chance to check.

I also wanted to visit Cape Spear because there is a location on the way where "The Awk" restaurant was built, a set piece for the film "Rare Birds" produced by my friend Paul Pope. The building no longer exists, but I did want to get some photographs of the area, which if you've seen the film, you know, is just beautiful. The surf comes in there like nothing you've ever seen. Many hapless victims have been swept away by the sudden swells which are far more dangerous than they appear form a distance.

I visited Paul's office and had photos taken of me with the restaurant's sign prop, as well as the unpainted duck decoy that plays an important role in the film. Also, my Commander got a shot of himself in a near-scale submarine, the actual prop used in the underwater scenes in the film. The film didn't get wide distribution, but stars William Hurt, Andy Jones and Molly Parker. Written by a very talented writer, Ed Riche, the film is about a floundering restaurant and a scheme that will attract customers. Very funny, and I think, Andy Jones' best work to date.

Our vacation lasted just over three weeks, one week of which was spent to drive from Massachusetts to North Sydney in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, onto the Ferry and from Port aux Basques to Springdale, as well as the same legs on the trip back. But we had two solid weeks to visit, and we did it right. Drove plenty, stayed in hotels, enjoyed the local areas, etc. It was our first driving trip through Atlantic Canada and we meant to enjoy it - we did.

The trip was amazingly well organized by my wife, and we did just about everything we wanted to, but if we had another month we still wouldn't have been able to do it all. While there we saw friends who we never expected to see, who happened to be visiting at the same time. I can't count the number of coincidences that helped make the trip magical.

Black bear, silver fox, tropical sunfish, humpback whales, minke whales from the window of my wife's parents' house, bald eagles, hawks, moose, puffins, murres, kittiwakes, awks - those were just some of the wildlife we saw. You can't plan that. Coming back from the King's Point barbecue in the dead of night we happened upon a young moose in the middle of the road, just standing there, staring. We stopped in the road (no traffic for miles) and just watched. Soon, the young bull turned his head to the side of the road and gracefully walked into the trees. My camera was out of batteries, otherwise I'd have a picture to show you.

Perhaps my favorite bird is the puffin. Small, black and white, similar to penquins, with a brilliantly colored beak, being in a cloud of them is awe-inspiring. They are fast little fliers and excellent swimmers and divers.

(Not my photo. Click picture.)

As our boat approached, many floating on the water made attempts to get airborne, usually successfully. However, if the boat approached faster than they could make air, they would resort to their second option - diving. It's kind of cute to see a puffin try to get airborne, only to give up and dive. We could see them streak below the surface so deep they disappeared.

Floating in front of boat	Trying to take off	Dive! Dive! Dive!

After my story was done, and my wife did some necessary proofreading and fact-correcting, my daughter read it. She's 8, and is the author of "Barbie Finds the White Tiger." She read the last panel and said, "Dad, you know what would have been good? If at the end, the ghost of his mother appeared, and said 'Thank you.'" See, why can't I think of things like that?

This is why I normally get input from the outside. For most of my stories, Sean Dickinson is my story-creation partner and he usually goes through each story adding here, fixing there, and generally making it a better story. This was a personal project and I had less than a week, and the images were all shot, (mostly) so I just did it on my own in a vaccuum. So sure, it could have been better.

As I said, there was one thing I didn't anticipate in Newfoundland. The laying down of the flag. So I knew I needed a slab of marble, the tri-fold flag, and my Commnader.

My Commander had been redressed for an upcoming shoot, so I had to de-dress him and find the same outfit he wore in Newfoundland. That wasn't hard. I found the tri-fold flag, and remembered a slab of marble in a local park. Yesterday on a brilliant but cold fall day, I took several shots of the Commander close-up against this slab of marble, a bench in Bird Park in Walpole, MA. The sky behind is too bright, and I toyed with re-shooting it today, with the sky a little less cerulean.

I think it works fairly seamlessly, but as always, I would have preferred to have shot it at the War Memorial back in early August.

I hoped my story would serve not only to honor servicemen, and Remembrance Day, but also to intice people about Newfoundland, truly one of the world's best-kept secrets.

Each fact I listed was researched, each shot I took is real. Please forgive any fact I may have gotten wrong, after all I spent literally minutes researching these things on the web, which as we know is never wrong or inaccurate.

If you see anything blatantly wrong, I'll attempt to fix it. If you would like information on any of the places I visited, please let me know.

I encourage anyone to visit Newfoundland, you will never ever forget it. But give yourself lots of time, there is a lot to see and it's a big place.

People who know me know I'm a pacifist by nature, and I am not into collecting GI Joes for the military aspect which makes up a large percentage of its product. However, I am also realistic. I know military is necessary, and I join anyone who honors the dead soldiers who fought for our freedom at any time in history. Being from Newfoundland there is a long tradition of selflessly running into battle situations no matter the cost if friends are threatened. Dig a little and find out how many Newfoundlanders have been massacred during war action in the past. Often Newfoundland regiments were used as cannon fodder. I grew up with the legacy of that history.

I also honor my fellow collectors who are involved in the military, and I truly wrote this story for them to show my respect. Anyone who can risk their lives for others are deserving of it.

Sean.