As did Hemingway, whenever he sat down to write, so now do I uncork my flask and set it alongside my keyboard as I prepare to compose this short memoire of my recent road trip through those intimate connections between General Relativity and Washington State, which is located in the PNW of the USA. The author will argue that next to Zurich, Washington State is the next most important venue in the entire history of Relativity. This is because it was in Washington were Relativity was first falsified. But I get ahead of myself.

Our story begins not in Washington, but in the neighboring state of Oregon 110 years ago; and even earlier than that. We find ourselves on a bargain price passenger vessel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean shortly after the end of the American Civil War. Onboard is a 14 year old German orphan who has be forced by a fiendish uncle to make his way to America to join another uncle homesteading in the midwestern state of Iowa. After crossing an ocean and half a continent this German adolescent looked into his uncle’s sodbuster’s shack to find a dozen other mouths to feed. Realizing the hopelessness of the situation he sat down on a stump and cried for the last time in his life. This was the start of my great grandfather’s American Immigrant story. Fast forward to the beginning of WW1 in Europe; the adolescent has grown old in America but never really picking up the English language. Still he has managed to cobble together a 4,000 acre homestead land claim in the middle of Oregon along with my great uncles and grand father. This was the last great historic land claim in the USA. The Indians had long been sequestered away on their reservations to make room for the Europeans. The European wave had finally rolled up against the Pacific Coast and was out of room. Last week the author had an opportunity to stand in all that remains of the water well on that homestead, now just a shallow depression. And to touch the rusted hulk of the old family wood burning stove. During the WW1 this German-American family had to fly the American flag above the ranch everyday and volunteer for every local war effort in order to avoid the charge of being in sympathy with the dreaded Huns.

What does all this have to do with Relativity? The family legend goes that my great grandfather, being a contemporary of Albert Einstein, had an interest in relativity. He passed this interest onto my grandfather who passed it onto my mother who passed it on to me. The ranch went belly-up in the Great Depression, resulting in my mother eventually ending up in Seattle where she met and married my father. The consequences for relativity are so obvious that I need hardly spell them out for the intelligent and erudite denizens of this forum. However, because Dono and Mutton Chops are also members of this forum, I will take the trouble to explain--had my mother not met my father the world would have never had the BBP.

It is time for us to leave the the stark beauty of the Oregon High Desert and head north across the mighty Columbia River and back into Washington where we will make our next stop: General Relativity's (soon to be) most holy shrine...