We put our duffel bags and carry-on luggage at the end of our porch while we waited for our ride. When Jonathan and his mother stopped by to pick up my son and I to drop the three of us off at Newark airport, you could tell Jonathan was ready and excited. Our bags and packs were in the car before we could make it out the door of the house.
If you thought business travel was fun, imagine moving 111 advisers and scouts through Newark airport. The airline had sorted the names alphabetically overall while the crews and luggage were actually sorted by crew then by last name. The airline seat assignments were by contingent and the contingent seating assignment was by crew. To make things interesting, the contingent was split between two flights. All of Crew 1 except for myself and another adviser was on the early flight.
I went off to make a phone call while waiting for the second flight folks to be called to the gate. That made me that last to pass the row of moms who cheered me on as I left the unsecured area.
I gather from the security folks that almost every scout had to be searched by hand with the "wand" because of belt buckles and metal in their hiking boots. It was quite a production and they were relieved when I told them that I was the last one.
Once in the plane, I found that Walt had been really good to me. My seat assignment was behind the exit door and the seat in front had been removed so that it could swing open. It was the best leg room I'd ever had outside of first class. THANKS WALT!
Both planes were late taking off. I later heard a statistic that at Newark, the average delay on the runway is half an hour. We were at least that.
When we arrived in Denver airport, I heard a scout say, after walking no more than 10 steps from the arrival gate, "I haven't seen any good looking Denver girls." Later on the train ride I heard another amusing commentary.
First scout: She asked if I was a Boy Scout.
Second scout: And you said no.
First scout: Then she asked, "What are you then?"
After a bit of a drive from the airport we finally arrived at the Colorado Spring's Armory to find it vacant and locked. Walter, our all knowing leader was about 30 minutes behind us because he had to rent a car. We tried calling the police, the army, and the alarm company and got an answering machine, no answer, or no record of the Armory with the alarm company. Some were setting up tents and rolling out sleeping bags. The busses stayed to make sure that we had a place to stay. At one point, one of them started driving off. We all watched as we saw the silhouette of a scout in the rest room in the back of the bus. It turned out, the driver was just turning the bus around and he had told the scout that he could stay where he was because he was just turning around - we just didn't know that. He received cheers when he returned.
When Walter arrived, he had the number of the person and it took an additional 15 minutes for him to arrive. We got to bed at 1:00 and had to get up at 5:00 to go white water rafting the next day - almost not worth rolling out the sleeping bag.