Jonathan has a Living Scripture video of the parables of Christ. In the one about the parable of the talents, a servant of the Master comes to tell the other servants that the Master is going on a long journey. The way he says long journey is really exaggerated and funny sounding. During this trip we often imitated the servant's voice when we talked about our very long journey.
On Friday, August 1st, we headed off to the base airport hoping to catch a flight to McChord AFB (Seattle). Most of the seats on that flight were cut, so we took the next flight to McGuire AFB (NJ).
We flew on a C-17 (C stands for cargo.) I liked it because there was plenty of room, and we could sleep on the floor. The only down side was how loud it was. They gave us earplugs though.
When we arrived it was well into the evening and there wasn't any billeting (military lingo for lodging on base) so we had to find somewhere else to sleep for the night. The list of motels/inns that the airport gave us was limited to places like Days Inn which probably wouldn't have been so bad if it didn't cost $140 a night! We are way too cheap to spend that much for a silly night's sleep, so we asked for a recommendation from the lady working at the check-in counter.
We took the CHEAPEST taxi we could find ($20 as opposed to the normal $55 charge) to a place called the Royal Motel about five minutes away. Actually, it looked more like the Roy tel from the sign. It was only $60. We thought we were doing pretty well. The receptionist had us prepay with no refunds possible. Oh, oh. That should have been a big red flag! There were no towels, the phone didn't work, and we saw a few creepy crawlies. Yikes. We did manage to get some sleep though. Landon and I have really slept in a variety of places in the past three and a half years. From the psychedelic hostel with decorations from the 70's, to cabins, nice hotels, motels, a kid-sized tent, and, well...places like this.
The next day we took the Greyhound bus--yes you did read correctly--the Greyhound bus to Dover, Delaware. The cab to get there was $65. Insane! But we have been living in Europe, which is pretty expensive, so we didn't realize exactly how crazy these prices were until we continued on in our journey in the States.
I have to say that I really liked Delaware. The Best Western we stayed in was really nice with and reasonable rate, and they even gave us a military discount. The next day we flew to Travis AFB in Fairfield CA on a C5.
We spent the night in billeting, which was nice, rented a car and drove to Utah. What a long journey!
