C.Y. No, I haven't heard that Dave Macon song you refer to . I'll mail you my address. Aaaaahhhh, Newport RI. That brings back memories. I was stationed at the navy base there back in '65 when I was 17. Our gov't was buying 3 Charles F Adams class destroyers that were being built in Bay City MI. I was in the crew that went over to pick up the first one, HMAS Perth, and we had get some US navy training to learn how to handle these "new fangled ships". After 4 months training the ship wasn't ready to commission due to some strikes at the ship-builders. So there we were, 300 of us with nothing to do. We were farmed out on various projects to keep us occupied, kind of like the Peace Corps. About a 100 of us were packed on to buses, along with 16? man army tents and a field kitchen, and sent up past Chepachet to live in the forest and go out in teams with the Rangers to chop down diseased trees and construct bush-walking trails. One trail ended up about 12km long and was named either after our ship, Perth Trail, or the ship's crest Swan, or Black Swan Trail, can't remember for sure. I think the fuzzy memory was caused by the fact that once the TV news people came up and did a feature on "all these Australian sailors living in the American wilderness" ( we felt like we were part of the Lewis & Clarke expedition )all these young women from CT came up to "discover" us. You really can fit 32 people into a 16-man tent! We were nearly too weak to chop down trees after that. We had to take a 6-pack out in to the forest for lunch to get some energy back into us for the night-time activities. What a month, it nearly killed us.

JG / F.M.E.