On the Road again…

Just a quick blog- It’s really interesting signing into the blog from here… Most of the character sets come up in Japanese language (Kanji), with a few things coming up in English… You either have to visualize the boxes with english or take a stab in the dark, so to speak.

Anyhoo….. This is one of those months from hell for work travel, been to San Diego, Sydney Australia, Dallas, home for one night, and am now back (for the 4th time this year) in Japan. I spent Thursday through Sunday up in Misawa (way up at the North end of Honshu), working with our Sailors who fly the P-3 Orion aircraft. These folks have flown many, many thousands of hours over Iraq and Afghanistan in the last few years, protecting any number of our US assets in place over there. To a person, they were very upbeat, glad to be “on mission” and doing productive work out here in Fifth and Seventh Fleets. They joke about flying a bird that is older than most of them (the P-3 first came into service in 1962, and many of the current bird date from the 1970’s), it does have problems and takes a lot of maintenance hours for each flight hour, but it gets the job done. I couldn’t help but laugh a couple of times, when they asked when I had flown the birds and I told them 1973-1992. The typical response was it was all MY fault they are broke… Sorrrrryyyyy….

After the Bullet train back to Tokyo (reminder- Don’t lean against the window- meeting another bullet train also going close to 200 mph DOES rattle the window and your head), and two hours on the ‘local’ train (there are a LOT of stops between Tokyo and Yokosuka).

I’ve been down here for a few days of meetings with various staff folks, including a couple who have just come back from Individual Augmentee (IA) ops over in the Sandbox. Again many positives, and very few negatives about what they are doing. Today I was on one of the boats I’ll be working with later in the year. Talking to the JO’s and Sailors was a real pleasure, and I wish folks had to chance to hear what they really have to say, not just what ends up in the media!!!!

Weather is a good news/bad news thing out here this time of year- We had a four hour lightening storm Monday night here (Sunday morning in the States). Just walked over and looked at the weather guesser’s screen, and lo and behold, Typhoon Usagi has us boresighted for Thursday… oh joy… oh joy…

Ah… Babs, I’ll trade ya- A little lightening, wind and rain for a whole lot of wind and rain!
OH well, breaks over, I gotta get back to work… Remember, if you see or know a veteran, thank them for their service.

Comments are closed.