My night may have been uneventful, but one of our troops had an experience last night. Apparently while I was with my mom listening to old ladies complain last night the rest of the gang was at the sports bar across from billeting having some food and drinks. One of the guys had more drink than food and was worse off than he seemed to everyone. When the last three left the bar, two turned right to their building while the last guy seemed to be turning left to his. He overshot and instead wound up in the golf course 1/4 mile away, trudging through the fairways in the dark. At one point he fell down a drainage ditch and bent his thumb back pretty hard.
He says he was pretty out of it but woke right up when a security policeman said "On your knees!" and ordered him to produce his ID card. Seems the guy wandered on to the flightline side of a building and was nearly on the flightline itself when they spotted him.
It didn't take the police long to figure out what was going on, so they brought him in to the drunk tank to cool off a while. Later when they realized his hand was really hurt, they took him to a nearby hospital where they wrapped it with an ace bandage. Getting back to the base was his own responsibility and took him until about 5:30 am for our 6 o'clock bus time. As he gathered his bags from the room he didn't use, he realized that the night before he'd had his backpack with about $2,000 of camera equipment with him and had no idea where it wound up. We searched the base as much as we could before takeoff, but in the end we left without his camera.
4 hours later we arrived in Goose Bay, one of the more isolated places I've visited in my travels. For the first time here I got to stay off base, and the hotel is pretty nice. I suppose a travel guide might describe it as rustic, but it works for me. Due to an apparent addition error on the part of the scheduler, we only have 16 hours here instead of 19. That means I have to hurry up and get some dinner so that I can be up at 3 again tomorrow.
Update, 29 May 03:45: I checked my email one last time before packing up the computer and saw an email from e that said someone called her to report that they'd found the camera. The guy who found it said the first thing he did was look on eBay to see how much he could get for it. When he found out it was $2k he told his mother who said he should try to return it. So, the sort-of honest guy looked through the bag where he inexplicably came up with my name and home phone number. e told him that the camera was owned by one of my traveling mates and he said to call NJ to straighten things out. Unfortunately e forgot to give me the phone number, so we'll have to wait until we get to England to get in touch with the guy.
