I made it! Really, I made it a couple of days ago, but today is the first day that I'm back on the internet.

On Monday, the three of us from Okinawa sperating at Pendleton came back to the processing center nice and early. My medical paperwork got fixed in less than fifteen minutes; a doc looked it over, decided that every section was indeed properly completed, and signed the cover page.

The three of us then cooled our heels until lunch while the civilian working our case typed away at the computer in our cubicle. She told us that we should be done that afternoon, so during lunch I drove us back to the transient barracks, and we all changed into civvies and loaded our luggage into the trunk. I was initially irritated that the rental agency didn't have any compacts, sticking me with a mid-size; it turned out to be a good thing, as we three plus luggage would have been a tight squeeze in a smaller car!

Our paperwork was finished by 1400 or so, and each of us sat down with the civilian and went over it, signing about a dozen different pieces of paper. We got our tickets, and were officially on terminal leave!

The first flight was leaving San Diego in two hours, so we had to boogie to get there. Traffic was decent in mid-afternoon, so I got the other two dropped off at their terminals, then went looking for the Enterprise rental lot. Which was no where near the airport, so I spent quite a while getting stressed out trying to find it. All ended well though, and I got to the airport in plenty of time.

Plenty of time for the chaos to start. I was supposed to fly to Las Vegas, then take the red-eye to Philadelphia, then a commuter turboprop to Elmira-Corning. Well, the plane to Vegas was late, so I switched to a Phoenix connection. I got there and got bumped to a different flight. It was still a red-eye to Philly, so I didn't mind.

That flight was hugely annoying, in that I was able to get no sleep. I arrived at Philly with almost five hours to kill before my 1000 flight to Big Flats. Then that flight got cancelled, so I moved to the 1125 flight. That got cancelled, so I was moved to the 1930 flight, which did not make me happy. So I changed to a 1620 flight to Binghampton, which is only an hour's drive from Big Flats. But a seat opened up on the 1410 flight to Big Flats, and I jumped at it. So I did arrive at my original destination, just a few hours late.

My luggage arrived eight hours later, to my total lack of surprise.

So here I am!

Posted by: Boviate at 02:02 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 474 words, total size 3 kb.