An Aggie's Life...: Our Adventure

Flying Space-Available is an adventure! We arrived at the Air Base bright and early Wednesday morning (read: 0445) and thought it was a sure shot to get on when there was just a handful of people there. By "roll call" there was about 25-30 people there...for 10 seats. Uh-oh. We started sweating it then. Luckily we were the second two-some called! Using the EML paperwork is generally a MUST (they tell us now, but glad we had enough common sense to use it anyway without prior knowledge) to get on the Hickam-bound flights. So we have a 2 hour delay. Yeah. Not too bad...my nerves are okay...and then we head out to our plane. This is when they hand us earplugs. Because we're flying in a C-135. This means seats (at least we had them!) facing the back of the plane, a sack lunch someone on the crew made (??) for ~$4, and NO windows. Hmm. This could be interesting. All in all it was a pretty uneventful flight...wait a minute, except for when we hit a good bit of turbulence and the plane started to drop a little and the little kid behind us started SCREAMING "We're all gonna die!!". Have I ever mentioned I'm not all that comfortable flying anyway?!? That was fun. On to more fun adventures... (I took pictures of our plane b/c with the 2 hour delay we had plenty of time to look at it from the terminal, but Michael kindly reminded me "No pictures of the flight line without authorization". You'd think I'd never seen an AFN commercial before).

Soooo....we land in Oahu about 11pm and try to call billeting to see if we can possibly snag a room. No scrimp. There was a place willing to let us crash for the 4 hours we needed -- cash only. Huh? I'm not staying in a hotel for 4 hours just to get robbed or catch some sort of disease. Thanks, but no. Out of the other hotels, the cheapest was $160 ...remember what I said about 4 hours?? Not so much. So we opted for our last choice available...we grabbed a cab and headed to the Int'l airport where we promptly set up shop outside the terminal at midnight (b/c they wouldn't let us in to the closed terminal) and camped out like vagrants for 4 hours.

Here is Michael trying to get us a room:

Our vagrant-style camping outside the terminal (with more than just a few quizzical looks from the roaming security guards):

At 0430 the doors were opened and we were able to catch a hop on one of Aloha Airlines last flights to Maui. We arrived bright and early to get our rental car and then promptly headed North to wake up my parents, brother and nephew -- Good Morning! Note that this is STILL Wednesday morning. We flew out at 11am Wednesday and arrived on MAUI at 0630 Wednesday morning (meaning we arrived on Oahu on Tuesday night after flying all day)...love that 19 hour time difference and crossing the Int'l Date Line!