I’m HOME! I’m so happy! We left North Dakota in a blizzard and landed eight hours later in tropical paradise! The flight was easy and passed quickly. The kids played on the ground except for in a brief patch of turbulence and Chris and I read. The only thing wrong was that when I walked down the jet’s stairs there were no beautiful Polynesian people throwing leis around my neck, like in the movies. I felt kind of like I wasn’t really in Hawaii until the eighty degree humidity hit me and I had to peel off my knee socks and change from a sweater to a t-shirt hiding behind a van on the flight line (which was all secluded until that moment when the shirt was over my head and I heard the rumble of a truck behind me woo-woo).

We called billeting and got the last room they had available. This is a big deal because in billeting, your room for the night is about forty dollars- in a commercial hotel off base you’d likely pay upwards of one-fifty. So, we did luck out! We also rented a car, thinking that we would go off the base in to Honolulu and see something more Hawaiian than the air force base, but after getting settled at the hotel we realized that being awake for roughly seventeen hours had left us a bit drained. We caught a really icky dinner at a place in the BX’s food court (yeah, not a lot of options there), then went back to the hotel to sleep. We woke up at three am so we could go get on the list at the terminal to catch one of the four flights back to Travis that day. We managed to get on the second one out.

The flight was fairly uneventful, except for when Jonas tripped in the bathroom and hit his head on the toilet and piddled ever so slightly into his pants because it’s really hard to control a full bladder when you’re in that much pain. Poor kid. I actually slept during this flight, which is amazing because I don’t sleep on transportation. But I was somewhere in the beginning of Mansfeld Park, with all of the characters swimming around in my head when I gave in and grabbed my pillow, laid it over my tray and passed out for two hours, during the which I had very Jane Austeny dreams. I then woke up, truly feeling like something had crawled into my mouth and died while I was sleeping, took a swig of Coke and passed out for another hour with my bum on one seat and my head on the other nearly on the lap of the stranger I was sitting by. He didn’t care, being asleep himself.

We landed and all of the passengers complained about the rain except me because I was so happy to be here, at home where it does that rain thing all winter long, I could have run all the way home with our luggage and not had my spirits dampened a bit. As it was, Chris got the car and we loaded ourselves up and went home. Then I went back to the terminal to pick up Fiona and her four year old daughters Gwen and Elena (L-N-Ah, not e-LAY-na). They were stranded and needed to find a way to San Diego so I brought them home and helped them call Amtrak and rent a car places. Then we drove to the rent a car place where they found out the lady gave away her car during the ten minutes it took us to get there. Nice. So I wound up dropping her off at the terminal again and feeling badly about it. I guess they figured something out because they didn’t call me for more help. I liked Fiona, not only was she fun, she’s British and talked just like Rimmer on Red Dwarf, no joke. If we are lucky we will be stationed someplace together someday.

For now, I am just happy to be home. Home has my own bed and my pillow and my itunes playlist, which I missed. It also has my very own thermostat that I can set to any temperature I please. Love, Love Love thermostat control! I had also forgotten how much I liked my Alan Rickman Sense & Sensibility desktop. It just made me smile when I saw it. I’m pleased by simple things!