From America to Europe.

Saturday June 9, 2012-Sunday June 10, 2012

Traveling Half Way Around The World.

Dallas----->Charlotte

     This Summer, I began my journey in Dallas, Texas at DFW airport. My flight was scheduled to leave at noon, and I was finally ready. My bags were packed, my goodbyes had been said, and I was ready for the adventures ahead. I said goodbye to my momma who dropped me off and boarded my first flight to Charlotte. When I arrived in Charlotte, I only had about an hour until my next flight left for Frankfurt. So far there was no one that I knew that was traveling with me. When I got to Charlotte and was walking towards my gate, I saw three people from CA who were going to my site but they were on a later flight to Frankfurt than I was which was super weird. I went to my gate and took a seat. I had slept on my first flight, which was about two hours so I was pretty alert. As I was sitting there, I looked up and I saw another person from Camp Adventure that I was just talking to on Facebook! Her name was Ashley and she was going to a site very close to the one that I was at last year in Germany! She trains at FAMU with me and she is a vet who was placed at Vicenza last summer. She gave me all the inside details and got me even more excited about Italy!!! As we were in line to board the plane we saw another person come up to us in their Camp A uniform and it was another girl from our training site who was traveling all the way to Vicenza with me. The three of us boarded and with a little switching around, we were all able to sit together which was nice.

   Charlotte----->Frankfurt  

     The flight was scheduled to be 8 1/2 hours long and with a personal tv and a list of movies to watch, I was pretty set. The flight took off and after an hour of chit chat, I began watching "This Means War". I was 20 minutes into it when my headphones went out. I found out that it wasn't my headphones but the actual plug wasn't working. There was nothing they could do about it, so I had to deal with no sound, and no tv. For dinner we had pasta and beef with a side salad, bread, and a carmel brownie. It was actually all pretty good. After dinner I was hoping to get some sleep but I miserably failed. I probably tried to situate myself 54 times before I actually got comfortable and right when I did, we heard this lady let out this uncontrollable high pitched, obnoxious laugh. Everyone was alarmed and one guy even stood up, started cussing her out in what I assume was Italian and then followed up with "shut-up" in English just in case she was American. It was scary. In the last two hours of the flight, I tried turning my tv back on again and seeing if the sound worked and it totally did! So, I got to finish the movie which was pretty cute!

Sprinting in Germany.

     We were finally getting close to Frankfurt and we were suppose to land around 7:08am Sunday morning. Nina and I only had about 40 minutes to get to our next flight that left at 8:15am for Venice. As we were about to land in Frankfurt, the plane had to pull up and do a "turn around" in the sky because they needed to do an inspection on the runway. This took a bit of time and we were starting to get a little worried. We finally landed around 7:25am and from there is took us 20 minutes+ to taxi. There were no gates available for us to go to, so we got off on the ground and went on a bus that took us to the terminal. It was really getting close. We ended up somewhere in terminal E or something and we found out our flight was at gate A-44. Great. Nina and I said our quick good byes to Ashley and began our 8 mile sprint. We ran through passport inspection, then threw the baggage claim, past our overall director for Europe, through the airport, through security, then through the all the gates running from terminal to terminal while everyone was starring at us. It was horrible. When we got to the gate it was exactly 8:15am. Our plane was there but, they had closed the gate. I was now sweating,  on the verge of an asthma attack about to die. This was just great. We had no way of contacting our site to let them know that we would miss our flight and we panicked a little. We went to the service center and they changed our flight to a later flight that gave us about 3 hours to rest which was pretty nice. It was a relief to know that there wasn't a really huge problem with getting our ticket changed. We went straight to our gate and I was now exhausted. After we put our bags down and I went to the bathroom, I fell asleep. I woke up and it was starting to get a little more busier so I sat up and started playing around with my iPad. A lot of people were talking to us asking about Camp and so we chatted with them for a while.

Frankfurt----->Venice

     We met up with about four other girls that were headed to Vicenza who were on the same flight as us. We all boarded and left on time. As soon as I sat down, I was out. An hour later, I woke up in Venice and was glad that we were finally here. Everyone's baggage got here safely and we headed out of the airport to the van where a staff member from the base was there to pick us all up. We loaded our luggage and got in. We did an Austin Power's type of back up, about 20 times, to get the big American van out of the tiny parking lot. We finally got it and we were on our way to the base. I slept for most of the ride. And then we were finally on base.