Catching up on Pictures

Hello everyone,

Well the internet continues to be uncooperative. I can only upload one picture at a time, so I decided to share the "historical" photo of the segment from the Berlin Wall that I mentioned in my last post.

In a couple of days I should have more reliable internet access and I will try to share more pictures then.

Thanks again for checking the blog and I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. Here on the base we had an excellent meal. The dining staff did a fabulous job.

Final Day at Ramstein AFB

(Well the local internet router seems to be having difficulty adding the pics at the moment. I will have to try and upload the photos during my next visit.)

This is the final post of the series related to my trip through Europe. On Friday the conference ended and I caught the train headed back to Ramstein. The route was different than the one I took at the beginning of the week. This time after Luxembourg I went south into France before heading east back into Germany.

The first picture above is obviously me riding along and was taken by a friendly conductor in Luxembourg who indulged my tourist request.

The second picture is shows the item I was the most excited to discover all week. On the way back from lunch on base at Ramstein, I came across a memorial garden that had this segment of the Berlin wall. On the western side, you can see the graffiti, and on the back side, which I assume was monitored by the East Germans, the wall is completely bare.

The third picture is obviously me again at the gym at the Air Force base. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have to givem the USAF credit for having some absolutely wonderful facilities and this gym is no exception.

A few hours after this picture was taken, I was back on the airplane and seven hours later here I am with about another four months to go in my deployment.

Back to the Salt Mine (or would it be Sand Mine?)

Editor's Note: The picture to the right is described near the bottom of the story. (Who am I kidding - what editor?)

I made it back to my normal location without any real difficulty.
Unfortunately, that means that the internet infrastructure is far less robust so I will probably have fewer entries in the near future.

Since the connection is so slow, I am going to try and post one or two pictures from my trip, but the majority of them will probably have to wait until I am in a better location with faster internet service.

With all of those alibis in place, let me finish up with the details of my visit to Belgium. Once I was settled in Mons Belgium, I picked up the rental car in order to get back and forth from the hotel to the base. For the entire week I think I drove 50 miles but it was a nice change of pace. The rental was a new VW Golf with a 5-speed transmission. Fortunately it is a small car because the roads in and around Mons were somewhat smaller than what we enjoy back in the US. I know for certain that my Chevy Avalanche would have been a major headache to try and steer through some of the one way streets/alleys that I accidently discovered.

The funniest night of driving was Wednesday - several of the conference attendees were supposed to joing the Admiral for dinner. The Admiral wanted to eat mussels that night, and as you could surmise, the Admiral's wishes dictated the restaurant choice.

Unbeknownst to me, I had to change hotel rooms for that night because my reservation had a glitch and somehow my room was double booked for Wednesday evening. So instead of caravaning with the group from the base to the restaurant, I had to go to my new hotel and then navigate to the restaurant.

I was armed with a trusty set of directions from Map quest, and was told the destination was only 5 miles away. What could go wrong ... enough could go wrong I found out.

First, my cellphone has no coverage in Europe, so for the entire week I was without communications whenever I was away from the office. That is a truly weird feeling in this day and age. Second, the map quest directions did not have the name of the restaurant, just the street address. Third, the map quest street images did not have sufficient detail to determine exactly how to accomodate the detour to my new hotel. Fourth, I don't speak or read French, so reading the street signs and comparing to the maps was a bigger headache than it would have been in English or Spanish.

The end result of all of these factors was that I spent about an hour driving through the same 10 block radius of eastern Mons looking for a restaurant that serves Mussels, and I hate mussels anyway. But it was dinner with my CO, so I carried on.

At one point, I decided that I had no chance of finding this place and that I had better go back to the hotel and revise the directions they gave me when I departed the hotel. Ironically, the road I took when I left the hotel was a one-way street, and my general sense of how to backtrack failed me because the road going in the opposite direction became a 5 foot wide cobblestone alley with cars parked alongside it. Remember how I said my pick up would be a pain ... I was very glad to be in a tiny hatchback at that moment.

Once I extricated myself from the alleyway and back onto a wider road, I realized I was not even close to where I thought I should be, and had completely lost the bubble on where my hotel should have been. The end result of this stupid search for the restaurant was: I couldn't call anyone, I don't speak the language, it was 8:30 pm and downtown was empty, and I had no idea what part of downtown I was in or how to get back to my hotel or back to the base.

In a moment of good luck, I stumbled across the perimeter loop that cicles Mons and drove until I got back to the area where the restaurant was supposed to be. I got back on the road where my search had begun 45 minutes earlier and saw a person filling up their car in a gas station. I decided I better take the plunge and confess I was a clueless American who spoke not a lick of French and see if he could point me towards my hotel.

The gentleman and his wife spoke enough English to advise me how to get back to the hotel. On a whim, I showed them the map and the address for the restaurant. They pointed me straight up the street we were on, and said "very close."

With a renewed sense of confidence that I could at least get back to my hotel, I took a gamble and searched for the restaurant again. I drove about two blocks and pulled into a restaurant that I had driven by no less than four times already and searched for a street address. There wasn't one. Remember, the map quest directions did not give the name of the restaurant either. So I went inside to see if they could help me refine my search.

It turned out that this was the correct restaurant and two of my co-workers were already there. No more than five minutes after I arrive does my colleague's cell phone ring (he is assigned to the base in Mons) and we are told that the Admiral cannot make it because his meetings are running late.

At that point, my local co-worker lets me follow him back to my hotel, (ironically he got stuck in the same one-way alley that I had discovered earlier that night), and we park our cars and walk to a nearby steak place for dinner.

This restaurant was right up my alley ... good beer and great steaks. The unique feature was that your food is brought to you on a tray with a super-heated brick and the raw meat. You then cook your steak to your liking as you eat your salad and appetizers. Personally, I wonder how many customers after a beer too many accidently put their hands or arms onto the hot brick and burn themselves. This kind of thinking is the twisted thought process that my Torts professor warned me would happen after you go to law school.

The dinner was delicious, and the beer was tasty and afterwards we walked down to my hotel and called it an early night. After all, I wasn't going to miss out on any extra time enjoying my Western style hotel room with my own private bathroom - I was living the good life but only for 6 days.

I didn't get a picture from the restaurant, but I did get a picture of one of the older buildings in the Central Square that was light up for the evening.

This post is long enough, and probably pretty mindless now that I am looking back at it. I will make one more short post about my last day at Ramstein, and that will contain something of historical significance I hope. Bye for now.

European Train System

The picture above is the HQ building for Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, which is not the most intuitive acronym I have encountered in military lore.

If anyone wants to look at the specific route I took from Ramstein AFB Germany to SHAPE (formerly known as SAC EUR), Belgium, this hyperlink allows you to select each country and the train station in each city. http://downloads.raileurope.com/map_europe/europe.html

Here is the gist of my route of travel:
GERMANY-BELGIUM
Kaiserslautern to Saarbrucken to Trier to Luxembourg
Luxembourg to Namur to Mons.

BELGIUM-GERMANY
Mons to Namur to Luxembourg
Luxenmbourg to Metz Ville (France) to Saarbrucken
Saarbrucken to Kaiserslautern


Each trip was scheduled to take about 7 hours and required me to change trains four times. If I had rented a car in Germany, I could have driven to Mons in about four hours. Although seven hours on a train and multiple connections sounds like a major headache, in and of itself going by train was less of a headache than flying commercially or driving.

As a 10-year airline employee, I know the ins and outs of commercial air travel as well as the associated headaches. Where most aiport connections force passengers to perform their daily exercise as they sprint from one end of the airport to the other, the train connections only required me to walk about 50 feet to the next set of track and wait between 5 and 30 minutes until my connection arrived.

Although driving would have been faster, I had not been driving since I left the US in July, and I remembered the "challenges" associated with learning to drive when my wife and I were deployed to Japan back in the 1990's, so for once the prudent decision won out and I didn't pick up the rental car until after I was settled in at my hotel in Mons. The other nice thing about the train was I was able to enjoy a tasty German beer as we travelled which obviously is not an option when driving.

The other huge bonus of the train was the ability to multi task ... I read books the entire way across the continent, and took photos of the scenery. I have flown in and out of Germany, Belgium and England several times for the airlines, and even though the cockpit gives you the best view of the scenery, it does not compare with the ground level perspecive. As soon as I find the cable for me camera, I will upload the pictures.

As proof of how simple the system is to use, on the first trip, one of my trains was running 12 minutes late. As luck would have it, the next connection had only 5 minutes of grace time. Sure enough, when I got into Saarbrucken, my connecting train had already departed. Nevertheless, a review of the timetables, the rail maps and some helpful assistance from a conductor got me onto an alternative train which got me into Luxembourg about 30 minutes behind schedule. I picked up the next train into Belgium and no one was the wiser.

That leads me to my last observation about advantages of the train system ... unlike air travel, it did not matter which train I boarded. So even though I missed a connection, which spells certain dooom for air travel because you will lose an entire business week standing in line at customer service, I just hopped onto the next train heading my direction and the conductors were completely fine with the admended itinerary.

So, in summary I found the train system to be remarkably comfortable and easy to use, especially considering I do not speak/read German or French, which were the two languages used on the announcements and the maps/timetables as I travelled.

Now you all know that I made it back and forth to Mons without difficulty. I am catching my flight back to my deployed location later this evening. I have rearranged my clothing so I can access every piece of warm clothing when I get on the aircraft just in case it is as cold as last week's trip.

Right now I am going to head over to the Health Spa (I mean Air Force base gym) and get in a workout before I go. For anyone that is ever contemplating military service, I would strongly encourage that person weigh the quality of life aspects of the service they want to join. As a Navy pilot, I am very proud of my military service and our heritage, but I have to admit the Air Force does a superb job of providing the best facilities to their personnel, both in the US and overseas. The gym here on base is as nice a facility as the brand new community rec centers I use at home.

My third and final entry regarding my week in Europe will likely be much shorter since I can't go into the details of the conference, but it will highlight some of the humorous events associated with dining and driving during the week.

Liberty Call, Liberty Call ... (well almost)

Fist of all, I totally suck at blogging. I had no idea it had been three months since I last posted about my activities. I can blame the sporadic posting on the fact I don't have easy access to the commercial internet, but still a three month gap is pretty lame. So, I apolgize to any readers out there.

I am currently on a bit of a break from Afghanistan. My command sent me to Mons Belgium, the site of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) for a week long conference related to collaboration between NATO military forces in Afghanistan.

My travels took me by military airplane to Ramstein AFB, Germany. Unlike my flight into Afghanistan, this C-17 was virtually empty. I had room to lie down flat in my sleeping bag without having to maneuver between other sleeping people. Although the lack of people seemed to be a bonus shortly after takeoff, I soon realized that the nice thing about sharing an airplane with a hundred other military members is body heat keeps you warm. Since there were hardly any other people in the cargo bay, the plane was extremely cold once we reached our cruise altitude. Eventually I was wearing long underwear, a jacket and a hat inside my sleeping bag but I was still cold. Even the tip of my nose was cold.

Nevertheless, the flight was uneventful and I arrived in Germany about 8 hours after we took off. I spent Saturday in Germany, where I picked up my train tickets to transit across Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium. I grabbed a workout at the gym and went for a run around the flightline. It was a real pleasure to run on grass (as opposed to gravel and rocks) and to breathe air that was not filled with dust.

Saturday night I indulged myself with dinner at the Chili's franchise located on base, and Sunday morning I caught a cab to the train station to begin my jouney. I got into Mons Belgium about two hours behind schedule but otherwise safe and sound. I will recount the details of the train ride and the week in Belgium tomorrow, but for now I am going to get some shut eye in a "civilized" hotel room, since I am heading back towards Afghanistan beginning tomorrow.

PS - I took some pictures, but ironically I forgot to pack the cable to upload them from my camera to my laptop so I will try to accomplish that in the next few days.

Erik

Current Location seems Permanent

Hold onto your socks everyone,

But I am actually posting twice in the same week. I will make a concerted effort to manage my time better to enable me to post on a more regular basis. However, I will be overly cautious in avoiding work related discussions, so please understand if there are some rather large and conspicuous holes in my posts, but protecting the missions and information is understandably my primary concern.

In any event, what I can tell you is where I have been here for the last two months - Afghanistan. I am working for a Joint (multi-service for you civilians) Task Force in Central Command's area of responsibility. How is that for a non-descript update?

As many of you know, my itinerary over the last few months was extremely fluid, to the point of frustration for many of you who wanted to know the details of where I was and what I was doing. This paucity of information will most likely continue throughout my deployment, but hopefully the fact that the food and air conditioning are doing quite well, and I am getting to the gym every day will give you an idea of my living conditions.

However, when it comes down to plumbing fixtures and walkways/sidewalks/passageways, I look back rather fondly at life on an aircraft carrier. I have a much better appreciation for western-designed toilets and showers, and I am quite sick of walking on gravel everywhere.

I hope everyone is doing well, and I will try to update you again shortly - hopefully I will encounter/experience something of interest, and hopefully I will be permitted to share it.

Take care,

Where the heck have you been??!!!

Hello again,

I am sorry it has taken me so long to update this blog and if everyone has stopped checking for updates it would not surprise me at all.

I am doing well, but have been very busy with long hours and limited access to the internet. Nevertheless, the conditions have been quite good all things considered. There is good food, the air conditioning works like a champ, and the gymnasium is excellent.

I will update again as soon as I am able to do so.

Best to everyone.