Autor: Raimonds Zvirbulis

As a young boy, a friend of mine and I would camp for a couple of days out in the countryside, the wilderness of south eastern Nebraska. We didnt even have a tent, just used blankets to stay warm and keep insects off of us. But that was something that I thoroughly enjoyed and wanted to continue as I got older, which led to kayaking. That camping somehow connected with my childhood experience. Being born in Latvia near the end of WWII, my parents grabbed me and my two brothers and fled Latvia because the Russian army invaded. We ended up in Germany and lived in refugee camps for six years. In one of them my father was killed in a truck accident. A couple of years later we arrived in America after a Methodist Church sponsored my mother and the three boys, to bring us to America.