First and foremost, today is Michael's birthday. Happy Birthday Michael! (It's also Mexican Independence Day).
Today is our last day in Norfolk and the USA. There is a lot to do. We have to pack up our camping supplies, donate what we aren't taking with us, clean, sell the car, and get to the airport.
The packing and donating of items goes quickly and fairly smoothly.
Michael has a friend who might be interested in the car, but it turns out she can't swing the money today. Oh well, we'll just take it to CarMax like we planned to do anyway. Which we head off to do.
Once reaching CarMax we get a text from our rental person that she'll be there in about an hour to do our move out inspection. That would have been nice to know at some point before now. Rational me thinks. Oh well.
We successfully sell the car, get back home (thanks to Michael) and frantically start cleaning. We thought there'd be more time, but there wasn't. Our realtor showed up and started going through the house with Dan while I was off acquiring sandwiches for later.
The taxi thankfully shows up at 5:30 when it was supposed to. I had been worried it was not going to show up at all. We pile the dog, four checked bags, 3 carry-ons, and the cat into the taxi. W is not happy.
Check in at the AMC terminal goes smoothly enough, but I am a little concerned when they tell us to just leave our pets over by arrivals until our flight starts to board. We can leave the AMC terminal so long as we're back 45 min before boarding. We have five and a half hours to kill because they told us we had to be there by 18:00 since we had pets. Our flight boards at 23:40. You want me to leave my scared pets alone for five and half hours? That doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Rational me checks in.
There's no personnel checking on them or anything. They just sit by the baggage claim conveyor belts. I am not okay with this.
Dan and I opt to just sit and hang out with our pets. Other pet owners are doing the same, so that makes me feel less weird about thinking leaving the pets is odd.
So we sit, and wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Ta gets taken away to be cargo and boarding begins, but it is not clear how they are boarding. They seem to be having people board based on where they are terminating. Though we aren't sure. We just get in line and push our way to the front.
W gets unceremoniously shoved under the seat and Dan puts everything else in the overhead bins.
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| Sunrise! | Airstream over the wing. Neat! |
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| Landing in the Azores. | The Azores! |
We take off and land in the Azores about five hours later. Dan has not slept much and is very cranky. We are allowed to check on Ta. They have her and the other cargo pets in a little fenced off area about a quarter of an acre big. We are allowed to take her out of her crate and walk her around. I have W with me, and take out her bedding because she has peed on it. It is pretty rank smelling. Ta gets to walk around in a circle for 30 minutes. So we do that.
I declare the Azores our first Italian adventure country visited. Dan disagrees. I think because I walked on soil (and picked up dog poo) it counts.
Dan is still grumpy as we get back onto the plane. We both doze for the 4.5 hours to Naples.
Landing in Naples. That may be Vesuvius....
Luckily our sponsor is there to pick us up, though he has a Honda Civic. We disassemble Ta's crate, and my super power packing skills get all of our stuff and us and the pets into his car. I may have ended up with some bruises from having to have Ta sit on me for the ride from the airport to the base, but we got there.
Side Note: Base is split into two locations. Capodichino is where Dan will work and is base proper. The Support Site is where housing, the NEX, the commissary and other support buildings are. We are going to be staying at the Support Site until we either get assigned to housing or told to move off base.
The Navy Lodge has us scheduled for 10 days now instead of 5, so that's exciting. Because we have pets, we are in a two room suite. We were also given this lovely welcome bag:
At least there's a real bed.
Our sponsor, Jimmy, took us out to dinner with another couple (Tom and Brittany) who just arrived as well. He wasn't excited about the place we ended up going to, but I didn't know any better to be upset.
We have tomorrow off, and then Area Orientation starts Friday at 07:15.
Tomorrow is going to involve sleeping.
But we made it to Italy!
