RAYS TAKEWAY ON THE VA-K
Yahoo here we go on our awesome trip. Where are we going?? Well... it looks like Spain and Portugal, nice warm beaches, low cost, beautiful uhhhh scenery. Yes sir, that where we should be going. Uh oh, the flights to Spain have all but disappeared except if we can leave Seattle and get on the Dover, Delaware flight we can make it to Germany. Well, that's no southern piece of heaven but Zie Vaterland haz sie AutoBahn und das ist gut! UH OH... Dover flight cancelled. So now we are paying (in air miles which Lisa feels are "free") to get to Travis (between San Fran and Sacrament) so we can go to Guam. Yeah Guam. The land of incredible beaches, Spanish heritage, great snorkeling, and beautiful wom... I mean wonders. So within 10 minutes of getting on that flight a family of 6 shows up and bumps us off that flight. GRRRRRR. Ray is angry at the family of little urchins soaking up my free seats to Guam. So.....we get a place to stay on base and off to the Jelly Belly Factory followed by the Budweiser tour factory. OOPS the car rental place is closed and the busses don't run on Sunday. So now we are off to the military mini-mall to get food, followed by a walk to the air museum where we got to see the planes that Grandpa Cal used to fly over the hump and then we went to the giant outdoor pool. That's where I swam with da fam and read my book. It's so nice where the weather is 80 degress and sunshiny. So at the end of the day we are looking at Monday to Hawaii (with a stop in Alaska?) or take a hop on a very limited space (only 10 seats available) to London. What to do, what to do. This is CDR Dailey signing out. See you again when the wifi is restored!
WHAT REALLY IS GOING ON....
A few months ago, we decided to take a couple weeks off and test out our Space-A privileges. Space-A is a means by which members of United States Uniformed Services are permitted to travel on aircraft under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Defense when excess capability allows. The first catch is that bases only post flight schedules 72-hours in advance of departure. The second catch is that there is a hierarchy to getting on the planes based on the type of leave you are on and when you sign up. Finally, flights can be changed or cancelled without notice.
Ray and I had been watching flights out of McChord and Travis for weeks and there were tons headed off to Europe... mainly Germany and Spain. We figured it would be easy to hop over to Europe. Ray was especially excited about Spain and scantily clad women. Within 72-hours of our departure, however, flights dried up. There was one on Saturday to Dover, and another from Dover to Germany with tons of space. However, by 6 a.m. Saturday morning the flight to Dover had been moved to Sunday and eventually dropped off the schedule.
We had talked about driving to Travis (located between San Francisco and Sacramento), but I found we could fly to San Francisco on Saturday using air miles and it would only cost $70. No, I do not think miles are free, but it makes sense to use them and get to Travis a day earlier without spending two days driving, one night in a hotel, and how knows how much in gas and food! There was a flight leaving Travis on Sunday morning headed to Hawaii and on to Guam, so we thought we'd head west instead. So off to San Francisco we went.
5 a.m. Sunday morning came awfully early but we made it to the passenger terminal and marked ourselves present. Being Sunday, everything in the terminal was closed, but a nice retired man was nice enough to make me coffee even though our arrival meant he was bumped off the flight! But, as fate would have it, there were only 10 tentative seats available and by 8:30 a.m. we had been bumped too.
So, what do you do when you're stuck on an air base with no car? We thought we take a bus into town, but in this little place no busses run on Sunday. We eventually found the Travis Air Museum and topped it off with a dip in the base pool. (Check out the new Photos page for a couple pics from our adventure so far.) We ended the day with dinner at the mess hall - which at least was better than the food court food we found for lunch!
We are headed back to the passenger terminal tomorrow morning and hopefully off to either Hawaii or the UK. Who knows where we'll end up but the adventure will continue!