Our Landen has an amazing memory. Allow me to start from the beginning. We went to Duluth, MN for our family vacation two years ago. Remember the infamous "no AC in 95 degree heat" vacation? Yep. That's the one. Still, it is the vacation the boys talk about all of the time and they always ask to return to Lake Superior.
While we were in Duluth two years ago, we went to an IMAX theatre movie and toured the William A. Irvin ship museum. At some point, Landen remembered hearing about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald ship.
He brought it up and asked what I remembered about it on our recent vacation. I only remembered the ship's name as I was not yet familiar with the Gordon Lightfoot song. (There are still a few things left that are before my time even if my kids say I lived "way back when"!) Yesterday I let Landen Google the Edmund Fitzgerald and he has been studying the history of the ship and its demise ever since. He can rattle off dates, names, and measurements like nobody's business.
This morning he started his research again and found a website called www.boatnerd.com. It shows a map of all the ships currently moving on the Great Lakes and updates every 10 minutes to show their progress. He didn't check it that often (only because I didn't let him), but close to it! The Arthur M. Anderson was the last ship to contact the Fitzgerald on November 10, 1975 when the Fitzgerald sank during an especially bad storm on Lake Superior. (I'm not for sure the Anderson on the Lakes today is the same ship, but Landen insists that it is and he has been doing all of the research, so we will just take his word for it!) He was especially interested in that ship's whereabouts today and by bedtime it had moved a considerable distance in Lake Huron on the map.
When Landen gets interested in something, he completely immerses himself in it. He is a mixture of his dad and me--the complete submersion/preoccupation with a subject (dad) and the interest in historical events and research (me).
Who knows what else we'll learn--or what subject Landen will be interested in--tomorrow!
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