Day Nine: Wednesday, June 8 Back to Spain and the U.S.

Today we met some other retired military Space-Available travellers, including one who has taught at Utica College and Herkimer County Community College.

We got up and enjoyed our breakfast, which came with the cost of the room at the Millenium Hotel in Naples.  The hotel provided a free shuttle back to the base.  As we walked into the terminal, we met two other retired couples, who were also hoping to catch a military flight back to Spain.  One was Tom Lenahan, a professor who taught at Utica College and Herkimer County Community College.  He was a retired Air Force security officer who had started the criminal justice studies program at HCCC.  He knew lots of law enforcement officials with whom I and others at the Rome Daily Sentinel, Rome, NY, had worked over the years:  Peter Paravati, Jerry Washburn, Ed Stevens, many, many more.  Tom, his wife, and their friends from Arizona, had been in Europe since mid-May.  They had done a cruise in the Mediterranean, out of Rome, Italy, to Greece and elsewhere.  Now they were headed back to their home in Clifton Park, NY, near Albany.

Here's a photo of them:

Fellow Space-A travelers, the Lemmermanns and the Lenahans.  Tom Lenahan, in jacket, has taught at UC and HCCC.

All 6 of us checked in at the terminal, and were booked on the flight to Rota Naval Air Station, Spain.  There were a total of 10 passengers, and it was about a four-hour flight.

The plane had an interesting bathroom.  It was in an open space, in back of the plane, with a curtain rather than a door.  To get to it, you had to climb up a short, steep ramp, then up on a platform. It was kind of like an outhouse seat.  A little primitive, but no one complains because the price is right on these flights!

While we flew, Bob totalled up our travel expenses for this trip.  It came to about $1.400, including about $600 for hotels.  We decided that we would come back sometime to Naples, reserve rooms in advance for a week at the Navy Lodge or through http://www.vrbo.com/, or http://www.afvclub.com/, and use Naples as a base for travel to other sites in Italy.  Maybe next year?  Have to save our money in the meantime!

Again on this flight, we sat in nylon seats along the sides of the plane, and had a friendly crew.  One crewman invited a little girl on board to "help" him oversee the plane's movement, from the big back door of the cargo plane. See below:

Crewman works at the big open cargo door of a C-131 at Naples base

He did make sure she held on tight, so she did not fall out!  On some Space-Available military plane trips, some passengers are asked if they want to sit in the cockpit.  Bob got to sit there on one flight some years ago, in a KC-135 tanker, out of Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, NY.  Also during that flight, our kids and ourselves got to watch, laying down on our bellies, one at a time, through a window in the belly of the tanker plane, as small fighter jets came up to the tanker to refuel in air.  Very cool!

We arrived at the Rota, Spain, base, and found that two flights to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware were scheduled for this evening.  Both are the huge C-5s, with about 73 seats available on each.

While we waited in the terminal, we talked to a young man, Andrew E. Glassing, who was in the Navy Reserves.  His hometown was Fort Collins, Colorado, where our son Nick works.  A graduate of the Merchant Marine Academy, he now works as a harbor pilot in New York City, guiding ships into the harbor there.  His temporary military duty in Spain was to guide ships into the harbor at Rota.

His father-in-law had worked as a FDNY official, and his brother-in-law was a FDNY firefighter.  His father-in-law had retired Sept. 1, 2001, from an office job near the World Trade Center in NYCity, just missing the 9-11 terror attacks by a few days.  If he had still been working, he would have been killed that day.  His replacement was killed in the attack.  Instead, he was in Italy celebrating his retirement, accompanied by his firefighter son, who also escaped probable death that day. 

The harbor pilot himself had been vacationing in Colorado on 9-11, and was due to fly home to NY that morning.  When all the flights were cancelled, he tried to rent a car, but they were all taken.  He showed his Navy Reserve ID and said he had to get back to NY, and somehow the car rental place found him a car.  He drove 35 hours straight to get back to NY.

Another man we talked to was a retired Air Force crewman, who had been stationed in Newfoundland, Labrador and Iceland, on the watch for Russian planes during the Cold War.  He was now an engineer with a freight train company in New Hampshire.  He was also trying to catch a Space-A flight back to the U.S.  On his trip so far, he had flown to California, Washington state, Ramstein in Germany, Aviano in Italy, Sicily and then Rota.  On one of those flights he got to sit in the cockpit, in the navigator's seat, of a P-3.

We boarded our flight from Spain to Delaware at about 8 p.m.  There were 35 passengers, including several young mothers travelling with young children.  In some cases, their husbands had been deployed, in the activity in Libya or Afghanistan or Iraq, and they were going back to their hometowns and their families for the duration of the deployment.

The flight last 8 hours, and we arrived in Delaware at about 11 p.m.  Very tired!  Found a hotel off base -- once again, the base hotel was full --  and crashed.

In my last post, I will include some interesting odds and ends about our trip.  In  the meantime, if anyone has any questions, I can be reached at:  chiphaley@yahoo.com.  And if anyone is interested, I have a blog about our  Space-A trip to Spain last year at:  http://www.bobandchipsspace-atrip.blogspot.com/.