In the Sandbox Now

Hi Guys,
We left Texas on Saturday afternoon and just got to Kuwait a few hours ago. The plane was very cramped and it was hard to fit in the seats with all our gear. Before we left we had to get weighed on a scale attached to a computer to make sure the plane could carry all the weight and so the ground crew could put the right amount of fuel in the plane.

We took off from Fort Hood and headed east toward Mississippi where we picked up another big group of soldiers. On our way I saw a lot of little oil wells on the flat brown land of East Texas. After about an hour I saw the Mississippi River below us winding like a brown ribbon towards the Gulf of Mexico. We then turned south and landed about half an hour later in the city of Gulfport, Mississippi. We had to get out of the plane so they could refuel. While we were doing that all the lights went out on the plane. It ended up taking 5 hours to fix the plane. We all sat in a big building and talked, making fun of how crappy our plane was. Later we ordered some pizza. Some people slept on the pavement outside the building.

Finally when our plane was fixed our unit had to pack into the back rows to make room for the other unit. The Leiutenant and I didn't want anyone sitting in the seat between us so we piled up a lot of blankets and put a pillow with a picture of tinkerbell as the head. When the sergeant asked if anyone was sitting there, we held up Tinkerbell. We were lucky that they put one of the skinniest guys in the unit between us.

I was surprised when they told me we were going to fly to Maine before we crossed the atlantic. It took around 3 hours to go from Mississippi to Maine. In fact, around 3:30 AM on Sunday morning our plane flew back over Connecticut on the way to Maine. We landed at Bangor, Maine early in the morning before sunrise. Auntie Katherine went to college in the next town over and used to sometimes fly out of there. There were people to greet us and we stayed in the airport for a few hours. Because our plane was delayed, we got to see an extra Sunrise over the United States before we left and one in New England to boot.

As we took off I could see a lot of the trees turning red for autumn. We flew up over Canada and over Newfoundland. We crossed the Atlantic and over Ireland and England. In the English Channel I saw lots of ships and Oil rigs. We then flew over the Netherlands where there were hundreds of huge windmills. Finally we landed in Germany and got out of the plane as the sun was setting.

Our final part of the trip we flew over quite a few countries on our way to Kuwait. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey and down over Iraq where I could see the fires where the oil workers were burning natural gas off the oil wells. Our whole trip took almost 2 days.

We are all very tired because our bodies are used to Texas time which is 8 hours behind Kuwait. So now its around 3 PM here, everyone in Texas is just having breakfast. I'm 7 hours ahead of you in Marlborough, so if you get up at 6 in the morning, I'm already done with lunch and when you are going to bed at 9pm its 4 in the morning here. It usually takes a few days to get over our bodies wanting to sleep in the middle of the day here, so we spend the first few days relaxing and getting used to the heat.

I love you guys, I write soon.
Love Daddy.