Bruce MacDougall:  

I enlisted in the Marine Corps shortly after graduation and ended up in Chu Lai, Vietnam in April 1966 with 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division. I left the Marine Corps in 1968 and stayed in the San Diego area for the next five years. In 1973 I drove to New York City in my 1967 VW Bus with bicycle attached to the front. I was headed to Metropolitan New York Council of American Youth Hostels to lead a trip around Nova Scotia/ Prince Edward Island with 10 New York teenagers. After the trip, I stayed on in NYC and lived in the Upper West Side just off Riverside Drive on West 89th Street. In 1976 I co-lead the cross country bicycle trip with Margaret Hawthorn. We left NYC from 135 Spring Street heading north and then west across the Hudson River via the George Washington Bridge. We decided to take a northern route, so we headed north to Buffalo and crossed into Canada and came back into the states after taking the ferry across Lake Michigan. From there it was more or less a straight line to Oregon through the Badlands and Black Hills, Yellowstone and the Tetons, southern Idaho to Ashland, Oregon. We crossed into California on Interstate 5, cycled Route 96 and hit the coast in Arcada. The only way to San Francisco was down Route 1; what a ride, dodging logging trucks most of the way. We made it, didn't lose anyone and had a great adventure. Margaret and I were married in March, 1977 in a Quaker Meeting House in Solebury, PA where she grew up. Our first daughter, Molly, was born in 1978, the year we left New York for Winchendon, MA. We bought an old, 42 room farm house, once an inn and hostelry for Boston teachers to do art work during the summer. When we bought it, it was a home for psychiatrically disabled veterans. Caring for these veterans, providing them with a stable home, was to be our work for the next 34 years. We car...Expand for more