When I went on my "Big Trip " in 1971, I did not own a camera, nor did I bring one. I regret that now, as I would have come back with so many pictures to help refresh my memory. Many pictures of places I can find and use, but all the people I met along the way - those I no longer can remember in regards to how they looked.

With one exception - Christy.

I remember Christy like it was yesterday. She shows up in my dreams sometimes and randomly just pops into my head. And it's been over 54 years as I write this. I have no explanation other than I think I fell in love with her while we were camping at Kalaloch Beach on the Pacific Coast of Washington and for the few weeks after that.

I tried for many years to find a picture of her on the Internet and never did. Then AI (Artifical Intelligence) on the web suddenly took off in 2025. I played with it and tried it and it could do wonderful things! Being curious, I tried making a picture of Christy to match what was in my head. I was amazed to find that I actually could get close to those images in my head. Of course they are not exact, maybe 85% of reality and of course, I have probably taken a few liberties as I did this. But still, I consider it fairly close to who we were/what we did way back in 1971.

So, in the slideshow to the left, are the final four images of my initial foray into creating a picture of Christy. The AI worked by suggesting models in swinmsuits. I picked one that was at least somewhat similar, though Christy did not quite have that perfect model body. But I liked the pictures. ;-) I had to do a good bit of work to get the hair and face more simialr to Christy. These three pictures are "okay" but not quite good enough. I had spent enough time on them that I kept them and moved on.

The next set of four pictures are my "Ernie and Christy" pictures. I had a picture of me from 1971 that I used and by then had an AI picture of Christy that I liked. We did wear blue jeans and I decided to use a Hawaiian shirt for me since I don't remember or have any of the shirts I wore back then. Christy did NOT wear her shirt unbuttoned like that in public, but we had enough shirt and button adventures when we were alone and in private that I decided the pictures were appropriate for my website. It's an unfair liberty that I'm taking sine I'm the one creating this website. That said, I'm sure Christy would not approve of these pictures...but they are my form of memories of that time. Her face and hair in these four pictures are almost exactly how I remember Christy looked. And I did put the little green Volkswagen Bug in the picture too as that had a role in our relationship also.

The next picture had Christy and I walking along the sandy beach. We did do that and later at camp we walked over to a log overlooking the beach near sunset. We kissed a lot more there. I had a funny experience there after it got dark out - we were having a particuarly lucious kis when all of a sudden there were brilliant lights flashing in my closed eyes. I thought, "Oh, so this is what it's like to be in love!". LOL, after we stopped to take a breath and look around, we realized there was a Search And Rescue helicopter just offshore from us dropping flares to rescue someone.

Next there are four AI pictures from my earlier AI work that were trying out different poses and locations. These depictions of Christy (and me) are not so good in portraying us as we actually looked like. But they were fun pictures to make. It is interesting how AI reacts to small change requests at time. I haven't figured out why it changes the people depiction at time when you are asking it to change something not related to that (like "make the grass greener").

The next three pictures are Christy and I at the Sapce Needle Park, walking around and enjoying our time together. The Space Needle was awesome to me, but Christy had seen it lots of time so she was making fun of me as we walked and talked. This picture also reminds me of a time at a different park where we had a picnic on a blanket.

In the last picture I'm holding an ice cream cone. I had asked the AI program to give each of us an ice cream cone but it only gave me on and then I couldn't make it get rid of the ice cream come nor make me hold in a more reasonable way. It also changed the girl in one picture which I didn't ask for or want. Very frustrating!

Next the ocean picture, early on when I met Christy and Karen (her girlfriend that she was camping with), they invited me to go swimming with them. Of course I agreed. I grew up swimming at Jones Beach on Long Island, so I was quite familiar with the ocean. They did not seem to be familiar with the ocean at all. We went out a bit past where the waves were breaking and had fun bouncing up and down in the waves. The waves were larger than we were tall, so we had to bounce off the sand to keep our heads out of the water. This picture is not as good as I'd like it to be, the sharp line between us and the water should be "softer". I'll work on it...

The last three pics are from the trip Christy and I took up the small, winding, main lumber truck road, Highway 101 to Port Angeles to do laundry and a bit of sightseeing. We found a laundromat and started our loads of laundry...so what could we do next? LOL, we went to the side of the laundromat and started kissing... and kissing....and kissing and snuggling up, pressing our bodies together. At least we weren't doing that on the main street, we had moved to the side wall of the laundromat.

On these pictures, the AI program drove me crazy trying to get it to understand that I was holding her around her waist. I think I finally tricked it and got the picture(s) that I wanted.

Overall the AI Program did a decent job on creating these pictures, though I'd still rather have real pictures but that opportunity was lost a long time ago. These pictures are good enough to closely match my ancient memories. Note that there were some pictures I just couldn't get the AI program to generate. I'll forgive the ones that violate it's modesty standards but for others it just couldn't seem to get the idea correct of what I wanted. Perhaps in the future, with more experience on my part and better AI algorithms, etc, they will be able to do this.