Dave and Brian's Excellent Adventures

I've done many things in my life, travelled, married a beautiful woman who gave me a beautiful child, worked world events, etc. Now, I can add to my list of things accomplished: ROV pilot! That's right, I got to drive Hercules. Of course we were just burning time, it was flat ground, and they had auto-everything on. Auto-everything means all I was controlling was left, right, forward, backwards. As long as I didn't hit anything, there was no way in Heck I was going to damage the $1,000,000 underwater robot.

We have officially finished our Black Sea Expedition, and now we have a day and a half to hang out in Yalta, Ukraine. We were supposed to get into port at 11:00 am, but got stuck out in the harbor, waiting for the Harbor Master to come out. Because we waited forever to et into port, I took lots of pictures. At 1:30 pm the ship was parked, and the custom agents were able to get on board. At 3:30 pm, the staring gun went off, and the ship turned into a ghost ship. As most people ran for the local bar, which is right next to the entrance of the port, Mary Nichols, Dave Wright and I went to the Nautilos to remove the microwave receiver.

The Nautilos was the ship following us with all of the other scientists and journalists that couldn't fit on the Endeavor. When we finished we learned how the Ukrainians and Russians say goodbye: Shots of Vodka. We toasted the adventure, we toasted the bond we had created, and we toasted because our taxi was late. We did a lot of toasting.