I finally made it

I finally made it to my base. After 7 hours of lay over in Germany in the USO lounge, I was pretty ready to get back on the jet. We took our same seats, which was nice, because I liked mine, even though I had to deal with the odd smell of airplane bathroom toilet water. The big guy sitting on the otherside of my row announced that he requested the in flight movies... Fast and Furious II and Napoleon Dynamite. Somebody told me Napoleon was a good movie. I wish I'd remember who said... And the guy who requested it slept through the entire thing. I took the head phones off after the uncle threw the steak at the kid as after 45 min or so, that was the only remotely funny thing in that movie.

Fast forward 5 hours...

As we were on final approach, I wasn't sure if I was looking at water, desert or clouds. turns out it was desert because ... SMACK... all of a sudden we touched down and you began to see "buildings" and runways. This is a huge base.

They got us off the plane and through inprocessing pretty fast... and then a little manual labor for the bag drag. Thank you Thank you Nancy for the bag tags. They stuck out among all those green bags. My favorite though was the guy who tied tennis balls to the outside of his bags.

The guy I'm replacing, John, was there to meet me with our Ford Explorer, which was nice... I think I was the only one on that plane who didn't have to throw my bags in a big truck and wait for a bus or something... He had already scouted my room and made sure I had sheets... so we headed there.

My room has a funny stench, which my roommate, Don, a Navy LT Hornet pilot, said was there before he got there so he keeps the window open when he's not there (as we're not allowed to have the A/C running if we're not in the room). I thought that was a good idea.

The rooms are small... my hopes of unbunking the bed were squashed by the amount of floor space. And I have a large locker with shelves on one side to organize my things... that made me happy.

Don works nights, but despite that... didn't come in all day. I popped a sleeping pill (thank you Doc!) and snoozed for a while. The bathrooms are a short walk... which is what woke me up. They are okay... pretty big. Not near as filthy as my friend Jim had described. And my shower was hot. The showers provide some semblance of privacy as they have a curtain over a private changing area and then a glass door into a single stall shower. The stalls have full length doors too...

This base is just like anyother base... all the modern convienences and most things seem open 24 hours. There is a huge plaza covered by what looks like a woman's bra affectionately called -- surprise -- "the bra" Around that and the BX are a knock off starbucks, pizza hut, dunkin donuts... you name it. Tomorrow I'm going to catch Spanglish at the movie theater...

Well, that's about it for initial impressions... It could definitely be worse. I can picture Ric here with his 3-wheel bike with horn, flag and beer cooler riding around...

Cheers,
d