the clueless american

I'm here in a hotel in Colorado Springs, using my cellphone to connect to the internet because I don't want to pay $9.95 for a few hours of use. I found myself on a 7-day "I've been everwhere, man" tour around the country.

Leg one started out ok but was very long. We left an hour early but arrived only 15 minutes early thanks to the 70 knot winds in the face. GP baked biscuits in the oven and later a pot roast--it was fantastic. In my years of flying the Herk I've never had much to do with the oven; I need to start doing something when I go TDY.

Our hotel is the Sheraton not too far from the airport, right across from the Doubletree hotel. The Sheraton was no doubt once a nice place to stay, back in the early 90s when I was a zoomie perhaps, but it's a tad run down now. I'm not sure if my room smells like someone peed in it or died, but it's not that pleasant. Add to that some of the aircrew favorites: 1/2 mile walk from the front desk to our rooms (are we still in the same hotel?), no breakfast, and pay internet. I think next time we'll see if the D-tree has rooms.

All my whining aside, it's not a horrible place, and in any event I'll get to see one of my best friends tomorrow before leaving town for the next stop, Reno. No doubt we're planning to leave early so that some of the crew can go skiing as soon as possible. Your tax $ at work!

Well it's day two and I'm still here in C-Springs. JT picked me up this morning at 7 and took me to a great little breakfast dive, the kind of place you'd never venture into or even find without a local at your side. I made a happy plate and got to pick a candy and get a sticker.

After JT dropped me off I chatted with e on the phone while I waited for the rest of the crew. When they showed up we got in the plane and started getting ready to go. As we approached the runway, the pilot started panicking a little because the plane wasn't stopping. We managed to come to a stop right before entering the runway. Right now I'm back in Base Ops surfing the web while I wait for the brakes to be fixed. Looks like we may be a little late to Reno after all.

Update, 4 pm Colorado time:

After way too much coordinating and waiting around, it was finally decided that we'd stay another night here in Colorado and then go home in the morning. I'm a little bummed that I could have shown JT the plane after all (I cancelled when we were going to be leaving early today). Since we're in town more than 24 hours we have to stay on base. Getting the rooms was another more than an hour mess, but the rooms are nice. Although the room claims to have high speed access, it's so slow that it makes it hard to do anything. I'm hoping that for whatever reason the network demand dies down later tonight. I'd hoped to not even be in the room but my calls to JT have gone unanswered. I hope I haven't been bothering him by calling home, cell, and pager.

Last night was a blast! JT called about 10 minutes after I posted, and they picked me up about an hour later. It was really great to see ET again and to meet their kids who are also ET and JT but have different names :-)

We went downtown and ate dinner at the Phantom Canyon Brewing Company. The food and homemade brews were good, but the company was excellent. I really enjoyed catching up and wished that e could be there with me. We'll have to fly out there together some day.

Today we brought the broke aircraft back home. It was cool to get more than 70 knots of wind on the tail; at one point we saw 400 knots ground speed! We got home in 3 hours, swapped planes, and then took off for MacDill AFB in Tampa.

They've put us up in the Embassy Suites, which is always nice. We enjoyed the manager's reception before heading out to eat. Naturally everything was packed on a Friday night, but eventually we got some seats at Steak & Ale and had a great meal. I don't think I'll need to eat much tomorrow.

I'm at the halfway point of this trip, and home for a night. The pilot from the last few days can't do the entire trip, so they scheduled it to spend a night in Atlanta so that a new pilot can take over tomorrow.

This morning we got up early and headed out to the plane around 8. By 8:30 the poor nav had puked twice. He's certain it has nothing to do with the manager's reception last night and something to do with what he ate. In any case he wasn't very useful to us for the first part of the trip.

Thanks to our day off in C-Springs, the trip was in danger of not meeting its flying-hour goal, or at least that's what the pilot thought. So, instead of keeping with the theme of getting where we want to go as fast as possible, he decided to return home by way of Biloxi. The main reason for choosing Biloxi is that the pilot hadn't seen the aftermath of Katrina and wanted to take a look. We flew all the way over to Keesler AFB and then picked up our clearance home. As we climbed up the winds once again got into the 80's and 90's. The pilot initially said he didn't mind if we got home earlier than his planned 3 hours, but then 5 minutes away from home he suddenly decided to tool around West Cobb County for 20 minutes. I think because we were so close to home and because he didn't bother to run his decision by us before announcing it on the radio that I got a little frustrated. We were all happy to be getting home for the night a little earlier than planned, and it was a little annoying to have that delay thrown in without warning. In the end we flew more than 3 hours, so maybe later on in this trip we won't have to burn holes in the sky for no reason.

On my way home e asked me to pick up our favorite fast-food-that's-sort-of-healthy, Zaxby's. 2 lights before the restaurant, a little dog ran near the side of the road but seemed to be staying off the pavement. Right after I passed he decided to trot out into the street, and in my rear view mirror I saw the car behind me run him over. Poor little dog, poor kids whose pet won't come home, and poor driver who got the pu pu platter scared out of him, not to mention the damage he took.

I got home to some real sickos. MJ has a cold and fever, and e is starting to come down with it. The Boy slept more than half the time from my coming home until now; poor little guy is tuckered out!

I guess now it's time for a little rest before heading on to Tucson tomorrow. We set a late takeoff so that everyone could go to church, etc. before flying, but I don't guess we'll go with a sick little boy.

Well, my time off didn't go exactly as planned, but it was good to be home anyway. Not only were e and MJ sick when I got there, but also our friends' daughter fell and knocked herself out the day before, causing them to cancel our dinner.

Since we weren't having company, e and I ate our Zaxby's and then took a short nap. It was shorter for e than me because she got up when MJ started crying. It was very nice of her to let me sleep.

When we woke up this morning MJ's fever was gone, but e was feeling worse so we still skipped church. Poor little e just wanted to sleep, but she stayed vertical to put together the chicken pot pies she promised me. What a great wife!

I helped e get the pot poes together and then helped her prepare the dessert: "Hello Dolly," a neat recipe e found to help get rid of extra chocolate candies and such.

I got to the base early, but we still managed to go slowly enough that we took off late. The flight out to Tucson was a long 5.3 hours, but I spent a lot of it running back and forth to the oven cooking the pies. I had overestimated the oven's size, but I was able to cook both pot pies and some biscuits for everyone. I don't know how the first one tasted, but the one I helped eat was excellent. e really did a great job. Unfortunately the dessert didn't fit in the oven at all, so we went without.

We got to Tucson around 7 local and then made our way to the hotel. On a whim I decided to ask the restaurant staff if they'd bake the dessert for me so that it wouldn't go bad. The first guy I talked to sounded skeptical, but his boss the sous-chef said yes without hesitation. I changed while they cooked it and came back to a perfectly cooked dessert.

By that time the guys were down at the hotel bar watching the Sunday night game, so we had some excellent chocolate with our game. I'm not much of a Falcons fan, but since I live in Atlanta and was with a bunch of Atlanta guys, I decided to cheer for them. Bad move. Right after I started watching the game, I watched a Falcon get a great interception then fumble the ball because he was careless with it. It didn't get much better from there, and they lost 16-3.

I'm back in the room now to rest up for tomorrow's long day. We're supposed to fly 2 hours up to Ogden, UT. The weather channel says it's going to be nasty up there, so I don't know where we'll wind up. Hopefully someplace warm.

As I often say to e, "Guess where I'm not!" We got the plane ready and were prepared to go to UT when the weather shop reported forecast severe icing at the base. We're not allowed to go somewhere for severe, so we started looking for a new place to go. The AC, who did this trip primarily to visit relatives in UT, wasn't taking no for an answer. He called the forecaster at the base directly to see if they had anything different to say about the weather. The forecaster there said that there was no longer a danger of severe icing and that they were retracting the earlier forecast.

Based on this info we got everything ready to go to UT, but right before we walked out the door the AC decided to go back to the local weather shop to have them remove severe icing from out forecast. During this time a new forecaster came on duty in UT and re-stated the severe ice warning. In disgust, the AC told us to plan something else.

Since we'd been shut out of San Diego days earlier, we decided to try there. The Nav got us into the Courtyard in the Gaslamp district. It's not the Marriott Marina I'd hoped he was booking, but it's pretty nice. The building is an old bank built in 1928 that still has the original vault doors below. The rooms are small but comfortable enough, and the internet access is free. Don't waste any money on the bar, though. When we asked the bartender about the posted happy hour specials, he seemed clueless and then offered that the domestic swill (Miller Lite, Bud bottles) was offered for the low, low price of $4.50.

I tried to talk the crew into the Strip Club, not a skin joint but a place where you cook your own steak. They sounded interested on the flight in but then balked at the nearly 6-block walk from the hotel. They preferred to find a sports bar right down the street where we could watch Monday Night Football. We walked over to the Yard House, where they told us there would be a 45 minute wait but then paged us 5 minutes later when we were about to leave.

The Yard House has a fairly impressive selection of beers, by which I mean they have more taps than any bar in the world. The website says between 130 and 250 taps (they can't count?). I'd guess we were somewhere in the 200 range. Oddly enough the 200-ish great-tasting draught beers from around the world were about $2 less than the low-end domestic bottles back at the Marriott. The food was on the expensive side but pretty good. I got the waiter-recommended ginger-crusted salmon on top of wasabi mashed potatoes. It was hard to see at first because the whole thing was covered in fried carrot strings, but it tasted great.

By the time we finished dinner the Pack were already down 24-3, and everyone was tired from being on the road so long and the fact that it was already 11 Eastern time. We walked back to the hotel and now have about 12 hours until showtime in the morning. I thought I'd stay up a while, but it's 9:30 here (12:30 for my body) and I'm ready for bed.

Ok, so I can't count. Or rather, I misspoke earlier. It's a 7 night trip, which means 8 days, otherwise I'd be writing this from home.

Instead, I'm writing from the very nice but loud Renaissance Worthington hotel in downtown Ft. Worth, TX. Nice because it's more hotel than I'd ever want to afford (the gov't gets a rate quite a bit below the general public for official travel), and loud because the KU football team is here to play a bowl game on Friday. I don't know why it is that you can have a hotel filled to the gills with strangers and will hardly hear a peep, but the same hotel less than half full where half of those guests know each other is a different story. I guess people think that they have such a large group that no one else on their floor could possibly be a regular business traveler who needs to work the next morning--not in 3 days like they do.

Anyhow, the trip here was pretty fun. This morning we decided to plan to fly over the Grand Canyon instead of going straight to Texas, thus ensuring we'd meet today's 4-hour and the trip's 25-hour goals. The visibility was perfect and we went right over the South Side visitors' center and scenic overlooks; how impressive! On the way we got to go right past Lake Havasu City, and although I'm sure we flew right over the London Bridge I wasn't able to see it. I'm not sure I would have recognized it because I've always thought that it resembled the Tower Bridge, but according to the pics I've seen on the web it's just a regular-looking, flat bridge that used to go across the Thames.

Dinner tonight was to have been the Chop House at the hotel's recommendation, but when we saw the $35-40 steaks we decided to move on. I was happy with the next stop--Billy Miner's, a Fuddrucker's kind of place--but the bossman was very unhappy about the affair and pressed us to move on. We finally settled on the Fox & Hound, a very English-sounding name that turned out to be a regular American sports bar. I don't even know if they had fish and chips, but they did have $2 pints, which is not too shabby when some of the choices were Fat Tire and even Guinness. After dinner I couldn't resist a stop at the Marble Slab Creamery, and then it was back to the room for (I thought) some sleep before our early wake-up. Instead I'm getting loud teenagers 20 rooms apart shouting at each other: "C'mon, boooiiiiy, let's go get something to eat." Even as the hall noise quiets down I hear that 3-4 KU players are in the room next to me having a little party. I know I'm an old, old man, but I just want those pesky kids to quiet down so I can get a little sleep.

Update, the next day:

The hall noise stopped exactly at midnight as though a curfew had been imposed, but that didn't stop my next door neighbors from loudly opening and slamming the door every few minutes. I finally drifted off at about 1 and got up at 6 in time to get dressed and eat my mediocre breakfast that was $4 more than the same stuff I got in AZ but tasted worse. Go figure. Anyway on my way out I decided to repay my young friends next door. I set my clock alarm to 7:30 and turned the volume all the way up. I couldn't resist a phone call from the lobby just to be sure. All may have been for naught, though, as there was a bus outside to take them to practice. It was fun anyway, and at least I don't feel so old any more.

Well, despite the poor night's sleep, everyone was in high spirits this morning. We got moving at our usual slow pace and then were finally on the way home. Nothing ever seems longer than the last 30 minutes from Birmingham to the base, but before I knew it we were on final for 29. We got home just in time to miss the squadron's pot luck lunch, but most of us were more concerned with going home than eating anyway. I said Merry Christmas to the guys and headed home. For some reason it feels like I've been gone the full 8 days even though I spent the night here at the halfway point. Now to enjoy a little peace and quiet before the house is full of Christmas guests.