The Navy Wants You To See USS Freedom

Attention folks around Western New York, do you have plans on Monday? If not, this might be of interest.

Free public tours of the Navy's newest ship, the USS Freedom, are still available for Monday.

The tours will be 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. Monday. The ship, coming from Cleveland, was expected to arrive Saturday, but now is expected on Sunday morning at the Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park at Erie Canal Harbor. It will stay anchored here through Monday.

Patrick W. Welch, director of Erie County veterans services, said the interest among the public has been tremendous. A press conference will be held at 4:30 pm Sunday. The USS Freedom is the first in a new class of warships. Dockside viewing and limited tours will be conducted Nov. 16-17, before the multipurpose vessel shoves off for Montreal.

I will give more details next week, but my contribution to the blog will be on autopilot for some parts of next week. I've been saving some good content so you won't be bored, but my piffy bs in the comments will be absent.

I'll be meeting up with the ship in Buffalo on Monday and taking the trip to Montreal described in the news article. I think it will be interesting. I don't know exactly why the Navy invited me for this journey. I can only assume it has something to do with you, my audience, and word of mouth conversations that take place somewhere near Virginia (since that is where over 1,000 of my regular readers are). Thank you.

While I do have the means to take a few trips a year, I am finding more and more opportunities are available that go beyond my current means. The plan going forward, if indeed these trips are insightful and useful towards the content on the blog, will attempt to find creative ways to raise funding for these types of trips to reduce my out of pocket expenses. To date I have turned down all offers for advertising on the blog, and will probably continue that policy and find another solution. More on that later.

I'm an observer first and a blogger second, and have zero interest in doing what Phil at Navy Times did and live blog from the ship, besides I couldn't do it as good as he did anyway.

I'm not interested in how the USS Freedom (LCS 1) manages to overcome the challenges it faces on the Great Lakes, on this blog the insights to be sought out regarding the LCS are a bit more focused towards the future.

Like I said, more details next week.