About

Silver Bullit

This site is dedicated to travels in my 1965 Airstream Safari - Silver Bullit - around the USA and my photography of places visited.

This is my second Airstream, after the first Caravel was stolen in 2007. Purchased this one in Virginia and restored it completely and have been traveling ever since. We have been to both coasts as well as the southwest. In 2012 spent the autumn in the New England states following the changing foliage, it was amazing, staying one step ahead of the closing campgrounds.

In 2004 went to Key West for three weeks to spend time with Alex Okinczyc, my cousin, who has a great treasure trove from our family history. It is a Nobilty Patent, dated December 6, 1815, issued under the auspices of a law in the name of Catherine the Second, of Russia, dated from April 21, 1785. After contacting the Archive in Minsk, Belarus, I actually went to retrieve the archival documents that accompanied this Patent and came back with six pages of family history going back to the 1560's, all written in longhand Polish, bound in large leather volumes stored at the archives. The Patent is akin to my own American Naturalization from 1965 after arriving in America in 1959 from spending two years in a Displaced Persons Camp in Zirndorf, Germany having escaped from Poland with my father's ingenious plan. In 1957, the communists would not allow whole families to travel for fear of them not returning. My father, Zbigniew Janas, an architect and contractor, paid under the table for a passport for my mother, my brother and me to travel to the USA to visit Maria Okinczyc, my mother's mother, who arrived in America in 1947 with Zula, her youngest daughter, on an American transport ship from Regensburg, Germany. While visiting grandma in USA for a few months, my father went to Prague on vacation with Mr. Keszek, whose wife also left Poland to visit her mother in Germany at the time, then they both risked life and limb to escape across the fortified communist borders and make their way to West Germany to meet up with their spouses and kids. All the families have scattered to the different corners of this great planet and made new lives for themselves. I still stay in touch with all of them.

To think, that our forefathers, had the insight to keep this document as they took refuge from all the carnage going on in that part of the world at the time! It is amazing Alex has it hanging on his wall in Key West, FL. With my aunt Wala, mother's oldest sister, having written a family genealogy along with Alex's Patent, it's been fun finding family history.

The village of Okinczyce, where my grandfather Henryk Staniszewski and my grandmother Maria Okinczyc resided, was a lumber town with Henryk being a Forest Ranger. The Niemen River was used to transport the lumber to the mills located down river.