A Few Complaints, A Little Praise, and Travelog

My last post was written before my travel. Now I can say something about it.We left Fort Dix at 9:00 pm on Thursday and stopped in Leipzig for an hour to refuel. We didn't see anything, because we had to stay at an isolated gate during that time, in order to not have to go through customs and for the security of our weapons. That was the first really wierd thing about our trip. Everyone was carrying their M16 or M4 and quite a few were carrying their service pistol. There was no ammunition, but we were still a very well armed flight. No one was allowed to carry a knife though. It was the only TSA rule that would not be waved. Even the usual liquid and gel limits were ignored, and the metal detector was turned off.I slept for a most of both legs of the flight. That was the right thing, because after we landed in Kuwait City at 7:00 pm on Friday (we gained a day going east), we didn't get to a place to sleep again until the sun came up at around 5:00 am on Saturday. We travelled with anither group in order to geet the MD11 full, and instead of splitting up our groups and bags at the airport and going our separate ways from the airport, we all went to their camp first, unloaded and sorted bags, reloaded ours and then went to our camp. Then we waited for the other two flights to arrive so there would only have to be one welcome aboard brief. It was a very long day. Sunrise comes early here. It is getting light at 4:00 am. That early it is quite pleasant. By about 9:00 am it is starting to get hot, and as the tempurature rises the wind blows harder. By midday, the sky is brown and by late afternoon, you can almost look directly at the sun without squinting. The heat is noticable, but bad as long as you are in the wind. Your sweat evaporates so quickly that you dont even feel like you are sweating, until you go inside, and then you are instantly soaked. Fortunately every building and tent has airconditioning. Our berthing tent is kept in the low 70s even when it is over 100 outside.Our tent has about 60 occupants in a space designed to hold 100. I thought it would be difficult to sleep at night, but it is so big that any snoring fades away before I hear it. Or maybe i am just to tired to care. It could also be that the creaking of the tent frame in the wind is loader than anyone's snoring. We are sleeping on cots and i dont have a pad of any kind right now, so it isn't very comfortable, but we wont be here long. In Baghdad, we will have real beds.The food is really good. One thing the Army really is doing right for us over here is food. The dining facility is as clean as anything in the States, and it must take a lot of work to keep the dust out. Dinner last night included steak and lobster for entrees and hardpack ice cream for dessert. The fruit must be flown in daily, but it is too fresh to have sat anywhere for long.The only serious complaint any of us had was the wireless internet. The signal was strong, but there wasn't enough bandwidth when the whole camp was using it. This morning it isn't bad, but most of the camp was still asleep when started. It is getting worse now. Yesterday, I had to try a dozen times or more to load some websites. It was only an hour ago that I figured out how to log into my blog. Google helpfully translated all of the Blogger links into Arabic. Combined with the generally unreliability of the local provider, finding the LOGIN link took a long time. It will probably take a dozen attempts to get this blog to post.This is getting long. I will have more to say later.