return from r&r

After 6 days of travel and living in tents I am now back in Herat, the whole journey went something like this:
- I left Annapolis last Tuesday and flew from Baltimore (BWI) to Atlanta where I arrived just before lunch
- I and 349 other service members left Atlanta around 8 pm for Leipzig, Germany to refuel and change out crews; flight lasted a little over 8 hours
- On Wednesday and after a one hour layover myself and the same other 349 service members left Leipzig for the cool climate of Kuwait, a 6 hour flight
- That evening we were bussed to a military camp in the north of Kuwait, about an hour bus ride, where we spent the night and waited for our next trip.
- That next trip happened on Thursday late afternoon when myself and 100 or so other people boarded a C-17 for Bagram.
- We arrived in Bagram a little before 11 pm after a four hour flight and forwarding our watches 1.5 hours (don't forget the .5 hour!)
- Because I could only find out at 3 am the following morning if there was a flight from Bagram to Herat I ended up not sleeping much that night, and there was no flight.
- I tried to sleep during the day on friday but the tents get quite hot and the beds were far from comfortable, and that night I went back to the terminal at 3 am to see if I could get on the mail flight to Herat but there was too much mail and nobody would be allowed on that flight.
- In order to avoid spending another day in Bagram and to better our chances to get to Herat I and a handful of others decided to fly to Kabul International Airport and try our luck from there, a whopping 10 min flight!
- As luck would have it there was a flight to Herat from KIA on Saturday but it was reserved for Italians only, and for us to get on it we would have had to contact the US embassy in Rome. No thank you!
- And finally on Sunday we got on the Italian C-130 that flies regularly between KIA and Herat, and we arrived back at Camp Stone, my "home" for the next four months, around dinner time.

Here are some pictures from the Atlanta airport, we were paraded through the terminal to the applause of all the bystanders wishing us well, it was kind of gay actually. But it wasn't as bad as the USO personnel welcoming us home when they saw us heading to the baggage claim to get our luggage. They got a lot quieter when they found out we were actually heading back!