Day Two - Winging our Way to Spain

Yay!  We got a flight!  But not without a little suffering and trepidation...

The 3 a.m. Thursday flight from Dover AFB to Rota Naval Base, Spain, looked likely, but you never know with Space-Available flights.  We've waited for flights at almost-empty military airports before, only to have the terminal fill up quickly two hours before the flight with people who have higher priority than we do (read:  active duty and their families).

So we waited.  It's not easy to sleep in a car.  Especially with giant C-5 aircraft screaming in loud and low, with the runway right across from the parking lot, every half-hour or so.  And then there was Bob's snoriing, which was almost as loud!  But we did get some sleep, getting up around 2 a.m. to check if the flight was still scheduled.  It was, but then they said 10 of the 20 available seats were already filled.  We found out later that these ten were Army National Guard Medevac helicopter pilots, armed with rifles and gear and headed to Afghanistan -- most likely for the coming "surge."

When they did the "roll call," to see who was waiting for a flight to Spain, there were only 3 other people besides us.  But then one of the young men said he was going with a wife and 2 kids.  So we got a little worried, afraid someone else would materialize and bump us.

But no one did, so we proceeded to the counter, had our bags checked in, got our boarding passes and proceeded through the security check-in. 

We boarded at about 4 a.m.  After numerous engine checks, one of the crew announced that they thought they had a problem (read:  maybe the flight must be cancelled until that problem is fixed), but the problem had been fixed.  We took off about 5:30 a.m. 

There are 63 seats on the top of a C-5.  So the 18 passengers had plenty of room to spread out over 3 seats each and catch some Zzzzs... The whole operation on military flights is much less formal than that on commercial flights.  I won't go into detail, so as not to get any of our crew in trouble, but I will say it's a very relaxed atmosphere.

I had not been on any long flights since we went to Alaska and Germany about 4 years ago, so I had forgotten how boring they are.  It was a long seven hours, but we managed to sleep, eat and read along the way.

Once we landed, we linked up with another retiree on the plane.  We shared our car with him, and he helped us find a hotel in Rota.  Then we invited him out to eat with us, and we learned he was a retired Air Force lawyer and intelligence officer, now living in Baltimore.  He has traveled all over, and had even done some work with Rome Lab.  His father served with the State Department in Bogota, Colombia, where he learned to speak Spanish.  His father later served as an ambassador to Africa.  So he was very interesting!

We are ready now for some more sleep!  Not sure when I will be able to post again, as the electricity is different here and I can't charge up the netbook battery.