James McLaughlin:  

On the day we graduated I was planning to go to UCLA. However, the Department of the Navy offered me an NROTC scholarship to the University of Minnesota, so I moved east. I had a nice time at the U of M and met Sally. We were married in the spring of 1970 and recently celebrated our 50th anniversary. I went into the Marine Corps that year and served as a Marine officer until 1990. My first ten years were mostly on the West Coast, including Camp Pendleton, San Diego and Japan. Sally is two years younger than I and finished her degree at San Diego State. She graduated in 1974 and began a career as an accountant and pursued that until she finally retired in 2011. Our daughter Marnie was born when I was at the Artillery Officer Advanced Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma in 1978. Our son Tom was born two years later at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Sally and I learned to sail in San Diego and we became very serious about it while we lived in North Carolina (sounds and coastal waters). My last nine years in the Marine Corps were mostly in the Washington, D.C. area and we kept a boat on the Chesapeake Bay. When I retired from the Marine Corps we moved back to Sally's home town of Mendota Heights, Minnesota (just south of Saint Paul). Sally continued her financial career with the SuperValu Corporation. I gravitated into information technology, first with the Wausau Insurance Company and then with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. I had obtained an MBA in Finance from Virginia Tech and then earned an MS in Software Engineering from the University of Saint Thomas. I describe myself as a software developer/project manager. Minnesota has a short sailing season so we changed our family activities to canoeing and backpacking. Both Marnie and Tom developed a lifetime passion for the outdoors. We all also have a keen interest in traveling. I had been to Norway in 1980 on a NATO exercise and had raved about it, so we all took a family trip there in the summer of 1995. Both children graduated from the University of Minnesota, one in 2000 and the other in 2004. Marnie now lives in Bismarck, North Dakota (a long story) and has five children. Tom lives a few miles away in Mendota Heights and has two children. As we became empty nesters Sally and I stepped up our wanderlust and we put some effort into mastering French. We made our first tri...Expand for more