Day 0, 0.1, 0.2? 0.3 - The Longest Trip

Where we were going was a looooong way away and would take a while to get there.  I knew that going in but I didn’t appreciate just how long it would be until going though with it.

We were originally planned to leave Sunday night but got told everything was broke and got pushed back 24 hours.  We were all ready to go and get started so it was a disappointment.  But the USO in Baltimore is amazing and they were walking around with ziplock bags of candy and snacks and little travel items.  Girl Scouts were running around giving out boxes of cookies because someone donated 200 to be given away.  It was actually too much stuff, my bags were full to the brim already and I didn’t have much room for extra stuff.  But how do you say no to an adorable scout who’s just trying to give you delicious cookies for free?  Like, ‘No!  I don’t have room for your free cookies, my bag is far too full of civilian gear!’

Anyway, everything is broke and we are at Baltimore and their plan is to have us check all our bags that night and give us our boarding passes and then they will bus us all to a hotel for the night.  That meant dragging our bags through the massive line, waiting in another massive line for the busses, and then waiting for the last massive line to check in at the hotel.  A few hours later we made it to the front and managed to resist their best efforts to lose out bags by not properly documenting where they are going.  I also found out that just because you are going to war doesn’t make you exempt from the TSA rules, shame on me for trying to get a mostly full tube of toothpaste onto the plane.

After putting up with one giant line that night we decided to be proactive and got an uber to the hotel.  It was way out in the Maryland woods far away from anything or anyone.  You could tell the moment we walked in that we were not the hotel’s typical cliental.  This was a 36-hole golf and spa resort that was obviously set up for business conferences.  There were air treatment sales conferences and the Southern Black Women’s Legal Annual Conference happening, and then there were 100+ disheveled, smelly, and exhausted uniformed military people there.

The Uber turned into one of the best ideas we ever had, we were at the hotel an hour before everyone else and didn’t have to wait in any lines to check in.  This was a huge deal because it gave us a head start on the hotel bar.  You see, that first night in Baltimore was a bit disappointing.  Crabcakes were both extremely good and extremely expensive, which is to be expected, but the downtown Saturday nightlife is basically dead which was disappointing.  We called it an early night and didn’t really get to spend any quality crew bonding time before leaving.

So the silver lining on the delay was we basically got a well rested do-over.  The challenge was that the hotel bar closes at 10 and it was 8:50.  So we had a critical choice to make.  They were serving dinner for us until 9:30 so we had to decide, do we eat and waste precious drinking time on nutrients? Or do we press and take full advantage of our delay?  Obviously we chose the latter. 

The mission now was to see how much ‘bonding’ we could do in the next 1hr10min.  We set a very brisk bonding pace and only picked up from there.  They had 4 beers on tap and a fair selection of rail drinks.  I want to give a huge thanks to Dennis the bartender there who managed to facilitate the bonding of our crew, and as the night pressed on the bonding of a few dozen other groups.  He also recommended his own concoction called a “Green tea”.  Not sure exactly what was in there, but I vaguely remember hearing Jameson’s, sprite, and peach schnapps.

Thanks to Dennis and his herculean efforts we managed to constantly have a beer in front of us while we waited on the next round of green teas to get delivered.  Now, what they failed to let us know was that this the influx of customers to the bar, they decided to extend their hours to midnight.  We never got that update and our bonding rate if anything picked up speed.  By the end of the night we were all nice and bonded….so I hear, I don’t remember very much of the bonding, but I hear it was good.

One of my well bonded crew member helped me upstairs and, after trying to open the door with a debit card and a driver’s license he managed to find my room key, figure out we were at the wrong door (no wonder the debit card didn’t work!) and get me home for the night.  Crew save is a good save!

All right, those were two very long posts that I never intended to be that long.  I don’t think they will all be this long, and I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to post updates, but I will do my best to keep you in the loop of how things are going and what I’m up to.  Maybe one of these times I’ll write a post that takes place outside the country!