May 22, 2004

In DC!

We arrived in Washington DC on Tue! We had to drive down to Austin from Ft Hood to take a midday flight to Reagan National. We made it to DFW in good time. We were delayed at DFW first by a defective seal on a rear door by MY seat!! I’m sitting there and the door next to me in the galley pops open! He starts chipping away at this seal and little pieces are flying everywhere. He scrapes away down to bare metal and jumps out of the plane onto the top of a van. A bunch of guys mixed up some green stuff and jumped back into the plane and slathered it onto the bare spot. When they were done – it looked firm and like a seal again. Probably took them less than five minutes. The lady in front of me was freaking out and calling all her friends – I think she made other people nervous.

We took off about 30 minutes due to bad weather on the west coast. When we finally took off, the pilot told us that we were going to have to take some major detours to go around the bad weather. Instead of flying over Mississippi to DC, we were going to have to fly over Alabama to Florida, then over Georgia, and North Carolina to DC. After three hours we ended up having to circle over Raleigh-Durham, NC for about 20 minutes waiting for the bad weather to clear up over DC. We finally arrived in DC over an hour late. This presented another challenge since the hotel was no longer able to pick us up. We finally managed to hire a SuperShuttle and a taxi for the rainy ride to the hotel. We got to the hotel after 2200 and had to way to get any food – we had not eaten dinner at this point. We ordered some pizza, devoured almost all three large pizzas and hit the sack. What a long day!

Wed the 1SG and CDR went to the office at Bolling AFB to check in. The rest of us went to get our rental cars and take care of uniforms at Ft Myer. Thu we finally had the opportunity to go to The office at Bolling AFB to meet the folks that we will be working with. We got our security badges and took a tour of the facility – it is a mind boggling place... with over 5,000 employees running around in all different directions. The building is huge and has its own cafeteria, dry cleaners, stores, EAP, post office, it is a huge place. It should prove to be an interesting experience for all of us.

Fri we took care of paperwork for our lodging that we will move into next month. After that we took care of some more uniform issues and then we each took care of packing and had personal time to prepare for our move to another hotel on Sat. I am looking forward to being able to unpack my suitcases for the first time in about a month and to get semi-situated again. I will also be able to buy some groceries so that I can cook some meals in the future. I did do a little bit of grocery shopping this week at a local Safeway. I bought some orange juice, fruit and other snacks.

We move again tomorrow and pick up new rental cars. Monday we go back to the office to maybe find out what we will be doing. I finally fixed the Photo Gallery and have posted all pictures from the past three weeks. I will add Kenny’s pictures tomorrow if I can. Check it out by going to the Mob link from the home page. I need to get to bed – until next time!

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