Almost There...

Well, as I write this I am in Kuwait. We arrived yesterday morning at 0550 local time. Spent the day trying to catch up on sleep, yet not sleep too much, because I wanted to sleep at night. I am currently 9 hours ahead of Central time (it's 0920am now, and 1120pm in Wisconsin). I do not have any pictures ready yet, but will post some as soon as convenient.
The flight was as good as it could be, I had a window seat and no one sat next to me. I think we were in business class. It's times like these I'm glad I'm an Officer, when we boarded the plane, we went in in order of rank, filling out the back of the plane going forward. I was in at the 1/3 point of the plane from the front. We spent a grand total of 18 hours on the plane, including a 2 hour refueling of the plane in Scotland (Edinburgh?). We were able to get of the plane and stretch out, but all terminals look alike. Flying over the countryside, I could easily picture seeing the Wisconsin countryside, but this definitely looks older. On the plane, we were there long enough to get 4 consecutive meals. WAY too long to be sitting in one place. We flew into Kuwait city, then bussed about 2 hours away to an Army base where we sit until our plane comes to take us to our final destination. Likely leaving within the next 24 hours.
The base here is pretty nice, comparatively speaking. The USO has a great set up with TVs and video games, there is various fast food chains here (McDonalds, Subway, a doughnut place, etc.), and a 24/7 internet cafe. We are in tents, or some variation of them (pictures to come, I need to bust out my laptop to transfer pics from the camera to the laptop, then to a thumb drive to take to the computers in the internet cafe). The weather was in the mid 80's during the day, around 50 degrees last night, and it's already getting warm this morning. The food is pretty darn good, I actually had an omelet (not real eggs) and bacon, which was a huge suprise since I thought bacon and other pork products would be nonexistent while we were over here. I had a hot shower this morning (everything seems better after a hot shower). There are many countries represented here, South Korea, Bulgaria, and others I have not yet been able to identify.
Sunglasses are an absolute must, nothing but sand and us out here. The sand is like nothing I've seen before, more like the consistency of light brown talcum powder than the beach sand on Lake Michigan. I am not looking forward to what a heavy rainfall is going to do to it, quicksand comes to mind.
Well, that's enough for now. I'll get photo's up as soon as I can, it may be 4 or 5 days before I can get back on a computer. Once we get to TQ, we will be very busy doing turnover with the leaving crew. Once they are gone, we are truly on our own, so we want to soak up as much as possible before they go.