And They're Off!

Howdy everybody, this is Rusty posting the first blog of the Afghanistan Vine trip. Now, I am only supposed to cover the events that transpired on Tuesday because our resposibility to the blog is separated into each day, I got Tuesday. This poses a slight problem because not only did very little happen on Tuesday, the day we left, but all the time changes either lengthened or shortened the time frame which I need to recount... it doesn't help that I didn't sleep the night before we left.

Well, on Tuesday, the 16th of July, all of our team arrived at the Louisville airport about 12:30 pm. We have six people on the team and thirteen check luggage between us all of which weight just under 50 lbs. We got those checked through just fine after a half hour bout with Bob discussing his ticket and passport problems with the check-in clerks. Apparently Bob's passport doesn't scan so instead of just using the computer to have his tickets printed out he had to have the clerks print out hard copies for him.
That wasn't too much trouble, just a lot of waiting.

We got to the airport at 12:30 because our flight left at 2:35 but after the tickets and security we arrived at the gate with a little more than 20 minutes to go. That flight went smoothly and then we landed in Detroit.
There we made our way to our connecting gate and waited or walk around until time to board. I slept most of the time because I was running on almost 30 hours of sleep deprivation.
We eventually boarded our flight, on Northwest Airlines, and took our seats, none of which were anywhere near each other. We think it was because we bought the tickets so late but it was fine. The flight was rather comfortable for a 7 hour flight, good movies, good service.

I'll end there for now and let Jason wrap up the flight and tell you all about Wednesday, I wouldn't want to spoil it for you or deny Jason the privilege of sharing the details of our excursion to Amsterdam. So that's all for now.