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So, as I said before, we’re back. We’ve been back a couple of days, unpacked, and gotten resettled and I now have time to update! Exciting, I know.

So the trip was actually a LOT of fun. We showed up at the pax terminal Monday morning and added ourselves to the “list” of space-a passengers waiting for the flight. Slight change in plans, instead of a C-40, they have a C-130 slated for the flight but no sweat, plenty of room. So we check our baggage and just wait for boarding.

Now, Goose is an NFO but outside of planes in his training pipeline and the Hawkeye, he’s never flown on any other military aircraft. I, on the other hand, have already done 1 hop on a C-130 Hercules. And it was me and about 30 Navy SEALs, pretty sure I was the safest civilian at that point in time should anything have happened. The difference in flying with the band and the SEALs? The band stayed in their jump seats for the whole flight whereas the SEALs were strung out in hammocks about 20 minutes after takeoff. Yes, hammocks. At some magic signal, almost all of them stood up and rushed to the cargo bay of the plane and started putting up their beds and then all went to sleep, quite the sight! This time, the only thing that was in the cargo bay was all the band equipment and our two bags. No really, our bags were literally strapped down to the floor of the plane about 15 feet away from us and we could access them if we wanted.

Please excuse the poor image quality, it was taken as we were walking by to get off the plane. But that’s seriously where our “checked” bags went. We got off the plane to not much better either. We walked off and there was nothing there, we walked to the side of the road and that was it. Literally. Goose called the base ops to figure out how we were supposed to catch the flight home and the guy said, “We don’t have a pax terminal, no space-a flights from here.” So we figured we’d just show up around when the plane landed and go from there.

Moving along, we rented a car and drove the hour or so along the autobahn to Heidelberg. Absolutely gorgeous countryside and well, being able to have a lead foot was pretty fun too. Goose was pretty much overwhelmed with it all and he finally realized just how…sub-par Naples really is.

To be continued, I need to sort through photos and figure out why the wp uploader doesn’t recognize/find the photos from my 60D unless I move them to the desktop. Rather obnoxious.