Back Into The Flow/The Trip pt. 1

So I've put off blogging for a while, for several simple reasons:

1. Laziness

2. Adjusting to life in Phoenix

and 3. Thinking about/absorbing the last few weeks.

As most of you know, I went to see Mikey graduate boot camp, or BCT as they call it (the army loves its acronyms). Once I finally got home it really wasn't my priority to blog about it. I put up pictures on Facebook and let it sit in my brain for a while. It was probably one of the strangest most exhausting trips of my life, so just for those who want to know (for whatever reason) I'll do a little summary illustrated by pictures most have already seen. By little summary I mean I'll probably end up going into a lot of detail anyway because a lot happened.

So the first part was getting there in the first place, which I only documented a little bit. I had my duffel bag all packed Supai style with everything rolled up since we (Michael's parents and myself) weren't planning on checking any baggage and after a little debate we decided to stay at Michael's uncle Brian's house (there was more to that but I don't feel like going into it). We went swimming, had margaritas etc. Then we got up at the ass crack of dawn to go to the airport, only to find that our flight had been delayed till much much later. So we got put on another flight, meaning we didn't get seats next to each other. I actually fell asleep on the first flight, since I hadn't slept hardly at all that night before. We landed in Atlanta Georgia and were put on standby for our connecting flight to North Carolina. Ah, the airport. So much retardness. Thankfully we didn't have to wait too long and that flight was only about an hour instead of three.
So then we got a shuttle to our rental car and started the adventure of driving to South Carolina and finding a hotel.You know how in Arizona all you see when you look into the horizon is mountains? It's like that, but with trees. Trees everywhere, and really close together so when the sun goes down you can't be sure if there's anything but trees out there and the road you're driving on.
Anyway we couldn't see Michael that night but we finally found an Extended Stay Inn to park at right as a storm was starting up. I noticed, after the whole trip, areas around army bases aren't so well off. You drive just a little too far and suddenly you're in the ghetto, passing really strange creepy buildings and looking for a place to turn around. I don't know what that's about.

We got up at around seven am, which was really four am AZ time (I'm still screwed up, two weeks later) and got some coffee before heading to the base and benches for Family Day: the day before graduation where you hang out and walk around the base looking for stuff to do. Their intro was pretty epic. They threw some stuff that exploded and made green and yellow smoke and ran through it yelling, which is pretty overwhelming to see in person.

There's no PDA on Family Day, so this was as close as I could get. No epic jumping on him and I didn't even cry. He showed us where he'd been sleeping and everyone in his unit kept walking up to me saying hi, already knowing my name, which was weird. But cool.
There really wasn't a lot to do on base; we went to a bowling alley but we just played music and games and had some food. We also met up with the Vandervoorts.

I'd been talking to Heather, the wifey, for a little while before we actually all met. The guy is Michael's ginger friend, and they get along pretty well. Their son, I don't wanna talk about. I questioned whether or not I want to have children. But it's hard when one of the parents isn't around most of the time, so I tried to understand. There's a lot of issues and reasons but I had to spend over 8 hours in the car with him and three nights in a hotel and I was pretty happy to be done with that and just let them be them.

Graduation was incredibly boring. Seriously, nothing interesting to say about it. They got in formation, said a bunch of stuff, I don't even know. What I remember the most was what happened after that. Originally Heather was going to take all of us and the guys to AIT in Virginia, and we were gonna have a fun road trip together. But her car was over heating and was in no condition to drive more than two miles.
So that meant we couldn't take them, which meant they had to get government transport, and that meant I had to decide whether or not I wanted to fly home with the Cooks or wait it out and see if Heather could get the car fixed and we could just follow them there. It was really really stressful and I hadn't slept much and I wasn't taking it well. I'll just put it that way.

Heather found a mechanic almost right away who was willing to fix the car as soon as possible though, so I stayed. And we drove. And drove. And drove. And finally we were by the base in Virginia and started searching for a hotel. The first one we thought we were gonna stay at we ended up leaving, because as soon as we got up there we knew we had to leave. There were stains on the walls, some of the lights weren't working, the chair was broken, there was hair on the sink...it was just bad. And since we've both worked at hotels we pretty much left immediately after filling out the comment card.

It was exhausting. I was a mess by the time we finally settled on a Quality Inn, which turned out to be really comfortable. I slept well from what I remember. There was a lot of money spent on this trip, lemme tell you. Splitting the hotel fees, gas, a new plane ticket, food...It was crazy. Michael was nice enough to help me out, which was really weird actually. I'd been paying for stuff for us for the last year and now he goes out and says stuff like "it's only a hundred dollars." To which I immediately responded "did you seriously just say that?" It was super strange seeing him have that much money to be able to say something like that.

So I'm going to work on the last part of this later and post this just to have something new up. I feel guilty for spending so much time on Tumblr alone and neglecting my blog but it keeps happening.

Anyway, come on back in a bit if you want to know the rest :)