It’s time to pull up roots and say farewell to all of the friends and acquaintances I’ve had the pleasure of working with these past 10 years.

My wife and I will be heading for flyover country, where we can forget about Queen Christine, Tennis Shoes Patty, Maria Cantwell, Norm Dicks and all their buddies.

We will be heading for Boise, Idaho, where the houses are all fairly new — and half the price of homes here. Where they don’t care if you wear a helmet when riding a bike, where no one asks if you own a gun, and where gasoline costs 20 cents a gallon less.

And more importantly, they have some very fine model airplane clubs where yours truly can practice his hobby endlessly.

It’s also time to say a fond and somewhat reluctant farewell to Kitsap.

This is good news and bad.

No longer will I have to line up and board the Bremerton ferry. Good news.

But on the other hand, I won’t be able to feast my eyes on the wonderful waters of Puget Sound and renew old memories of gunkholes I have dropped anchor in. Definitely bad news.

I first moved here in the summer of 1999. One day it occurred to me that there were no bridges across the Sound.

I began to ask why and got some pretty hilarious answers from local politicians.

After some searching, I found a group of men with similar views, who called themselves the Old Boys’ Bridge Club.

We met over lunches at the Red Robin in Silverdale many times, and over the years we achieved some noteworthy successes — just no bridges.

Our group included Randy Boss, Ralls Clotfelder, Bill Rossiter, Matt Ryan, Chuck Shank, Stan Stageburg and a few others whose names have escaped me. From time to time we included County Commissioner Jan Angel, State Sen. Derek Kilmer, State Rep. Larry Seaquist and Port Commissioner Bill Mahan in our activities.

I trust the Old Boys will carry on in my absence, as it is essential to the success of transportation on the Sound.

The main feature of our proposal was a concept known as the Submerged Floating Tunnel, or SFT, which consisted of a pair of large cylindrical tubes suspended about 100 feet below the surface, each carrying three lanes of traffic.

It was to have been constructed from Burien to Southworth, providing a connection between SeaTac airport and the peninsula.

But it never got off the ground, although not because of any lack of effort by the proponents.

The main snag was the Kitsap Planning Department, which has the final say over much of what Kitsap does.

Another plan was to move the Bremerton ferry terminal to Blake Harbor and turn the terminal building into a huge marine aquarium, just like the one in Baltimore, which has been immensely popular to tourists from all over the world.

Our aquarium would have added significantly to the historic nature of the Bremerton waterfront — and not incidentally, to the revenue from a horde of vacationers, which would be staying at the new hotel and visiting the shops and convention center along the new waterfront.

But the people of Bainbridge were not enthused about having a freeway cutting across their island, although the plan was to build it underground to avoid interference, just like I-90 across Mercer Island.

So the dream never got into the plans for Bremerton.

What did make it, however, was the Big Dig, which cost many, many millions of dollars.

This was accomplished rather than building a bridge across Sinclair Inlet, another of the Old Boys’ plans, which would have made a lot more sense.

The port had this wild notion of building some sort of incubator for new businesses that are interested in cashing in on the new wave of “green” enterprises with its highly criticized SEED project.

Until the recent arrival of the new CEO, former Bremerton Mayor Cary Bozeman, the port seemed about to raise its middle finger once again to the enraged taxpayers.

Bozeman has apparently cut through the wasteful practices of the board and called for a critical examination of the SEED project, as well as the other questionable operations the port is involved in.

Well done, Mr. Mayor.

Another of my own pet projects was to create a band competition for the youth of the area. This was inspired by the Waterloo (Ontario) Band Festival, which was immensely popular when I was a young man in the Canadian Air Force.

We would go to compete with bands from all over Canada and the United States. The winners were justifiably proud of their achievements.

I enlisted the support of bands from all over the county, including a Navy band of some repute.

But when I asked the local school boards for support, the result was negative.

They said they already had enough band competitions and couldn’t see the need for any more.

The most auspicious project I was involved in was one of my own ideas. I had developed an idea for generating electricity using tidal turbines, and using the electricity to produce hydrogen to power our cars.

Randy Boss and I had the project all mapped out. We would make use of the robust tides in the Puget Sound and out on the coast to turn the turbines.

The electricity would be sent via specially constructed electric power lines to remote hydrogen generating plants, local workers would be employed to build the plants needed to manufacture hydrogen tanks and conversion kits for automobiles, and a distribution net would be set up to sell the product to motorists.

It was estimated that the electricity would cost roughly three or four cents per kilowatt hour.

It takes 33 kilowatt hours of electricity to produce one gallon equivalent of hydrogen. Thus it would mean $1.00 to $1.33 a gallon for the hydrogen, plus a little extra for distribution.

Yes, it would have been great — a whole economy built on a realization that hydrogen could be used directly in automobiles.

The project never got off the ground. I tried to get local county officials interested, to no avail.

Lastly, I have been a member of the Kitsap Alliance of Property Owners almost since its formation. My association with them has been an enjoyable one, but frequently my suggestions seemed to fall on deaf ears.

I was once accused of being an “Idea Man,” when what was needed was a worker.

I still am an idea man. As an engineer, I feel that’s what I was intended to be. But my hat is off to Vivian Henderson, whose accomplishments are legendary and important to the community she serves.

It has all been fun, and that makes a difference, I suppose.

So who knows? Maybe someone will see to it that the bridges get built, the port doesn’t get SEED, the hydrogen gets produced and KAPO will continue to protect Kitsap home owners’ property rights.

Adios, amigos and Amigas.

Bill Bambrick is a Port Orchard resident and a former Independent columnist.