What they are really saying here is “You women are CRAZY!”  You see, 5 of my friends and I decided to head to Guam for about a week.  We each have 2 kids under age 4.  10 under age 3 actually.  4 under age 1.  Yeah, that’s a lot of little kids.  We did our research on Guam.  We thought we were well prepared.  And, well...here is the rest of the story...

Day 1 - Sunday, 22 Feb.  We planned to take a direct flight to Guam Sunday morning.  The C-17 was supposed to be practically empty and take 50 or so passengers.  We show up and it turns out they loaded the plane FULL (thanks to a broken C-5 on the runway for the past week whose cargo needed to move).  Instead of giving up, we decided to take a flight later that day to Okinawa and “then” get to Guam from there the following day (chances looked good...2 flights were headed to Guam from Kadena on Monday).

We arrived in Japan around midnight with a “telephone” reservation at an off-base hotel for $300 a night per room.  Billeting was full, so that was our only option.  The customs guy informed us that he needed to transport all 18 of us to the GOJ (Government of Japan) immigrations office off-base for a passport stamp.  It was about a 30 minute trip.  He only had a small van.  He said if we stayed on base that we could skip that...so we called billeting and begged to get in.  They finally had mercy and sold us ONE room!  It was a TLF, which is a 1 bedroom apartment (probably 800 sq. ft.).  So, all 18 of us slept there.  We had no other choice, really.  It was that or spend the rest of the night driving back and forth to the GOJ to process all 18 of us.  The night was pretty hectic, as you can imagine.  The billeting guy was very compassionate and gave us lots of extra pillows and blankets.  We worked together to set up the pack-n-plays in an orderly fashion and move and stack furniture to maximize floor space to sleep.  It was easily 2 am before we were ready for sleep (but seriously, do you think any of us really slept in that situation?). 

OK, that’s it for day 1.  Stay tuned for tomorrow’s “Day 2” entry!