Day (-1)

A few quick thoughts as I sit in the hotel at Baltamore and wait for the crew and I to go out and grab some seafood.  After juuuuust over a year of living in Tucson I am craving some fresh seafood.  Weird.

Oh and speaking of which, here is the luxurious 8th story view of downtown Baltimore from my hotel room:

It’s pretty amazing how the massive pile of crap in the middle of my room that I was tripping over for the past few days got crammed into my two bags.  It’s brutal, I would say 65-70% of the bag is civilian cloths and pt stuff and the last little bit is equipment and uniforms.  Marines will never know the struggle of trying to fit all your off duty stuff into your deployment bag.  Lucky jarheads.

The experience for getting dropped off at the airport is much much different for me than most of the other crew.  Our Aircraft Commander (AC, aka the guy in charge of herding all of us kitty kats) showed up with his 2-year-old daughter and his wife, with their 3-week-old newborn strapped to her chest in tow.  The co-pilot (CP) had his wife there and she stood at the edge of the security line while we slowly moved up the ramp and stayed there until we were all the way through.  Others were just happy that this time there weren’t any tears.   Almost everyone on the crew has a wife/family/girlfriend they are leaving behind.  Meanwhile I don’t even have a goldfish to absently notice no one has cleaned his or her tank in a while.  My toughest good-bye was shutting my server down and moving it to a friend’s house while I’m away.  I don’t know what kind of stresses or pressures this trip will bring, but I know it will be that much tougher on them, having to worry about those close to them that they left behind.

[Just to clarify the above paragraph for my family:  I do love you more than my server!  It was really hard saying good buy to you too.  Just making jokes :]

Chicago style hotdogs are covered with a bright bright Florence green garnish that I think is some kind of relish.  I can’t overstate how 90’s-day-glow green these hotdogs are.

I love that charging stations are so ubiquitous and free now.  It used to be you’d have to wonder around the airport looking for a lone outlet or a vending machine you can reach behind and unplug until someone comes by and yells at you.  I mean now that my plane tickets are on my phone it’s pretty necessary.

Pre-check security is something I can’t go without anymore now that I have a taste.  For whatever reason they didn’t put on our tickets that we have pre-check so we all had to go through normal security like the unchecked masses.  It was just so terrible now that I got a taste of how the pre-0checked live.

All of out deploy ‘stashes are coming along nicely, with the AC leading the way.