Half Failed Connection – An Ode to Military Humor

If you have been reading a few of my last few weekly posts, you know that I have written about my family’s departure from Hawaii on our way to Tacoma en route to North Dakota and the East Coast.  I was ultimately headed to the East Coast to Fort Lee, Virginia to attend the Logistics Executive Development Course.  The stops in Tacoma and North Dakota were to visit relatives.  Oh yeah, the stop in North Dakota was also to retrieve my red Chevy van.  You may have read my post about the really rough landing that my luggage experienced.  To be brutally honest, my luggage was beat to hell.  My luggage looked like it had been beaten by a bunch of gangbangers with chains and clubs to within an inch of its life.  Well, after I settled all of the claims for my lost, damaged, and destroyed luggage with the airline and the Army, my family and I relaxed and enjoyed some vacation time with our relatives.  The last thing on the agenda while we were in Tacoma was to celebrate my son’s birthday.  After we had celebrated my son’s birthday and visited all of our friends and relatives that would see us and visit with us, we decided it was time to head for North Dakota.  Now you may be wondering why I worded that last sentence the way I did.  Well, if you had been paying attention, I think that would be pretty obvious to you.  What’s that?  It’s not?  Oh.  Well, simply put, there were some relatives who will remain unnamed (my half sisters) that refused to answer their door, or their telephone for that matter, and visit with us.  Okay.  That was fine with me too.  I wasn’t about to lose any sleep over that.  But I was whispering to myself, “It will be a mighty cold day in hell before I ever try to come back here again to visit these people.”  Since we hadn’t been having really good luck with United Airlines, I decided to have the Army travel office book our next flight to North Dakota on Northwest Airlines.  Hopefully those bastards wouldn’t lose our luggage or beat it up like it had been through a war zone.  We were in luck.  The fly to North Dakota went off without a hitch.  We actually had to fly into Minneapolis, Minnesota and then catch a puddle hopper over to Fargo, North Dakota.  Puddle hopper flights are always real fun because every little bit of turbulence in the air causes those little rubber-band-propelled airplanes to bounce all over the sky like a kite.  And of course, the captain keeps the seatbelt sign lit the whole damn time you’re in the sky because of the turbulence.  Forget the fact that the passengers’ heads are bouncing off the damn ceiling of the plane the whole damn time that the plane is in the sky.  No.  That’s not because the plane is made out of rubber.  That’s because there’s only a couple of inches between the heads of the passengers and the ceiling of the plane.  I’m not really sure just exactly how in the hell the rubber band gets wound to propel the plane.  Perhaps they have a few monkeys in cages down in the luggage compartment.  That would explain why the plane is also so damn noisy.  If this was one of those proverbial flights from hell simply because there was so damn much turbulence that it caused the kids to be fussy and cranky and generally pissed off at the world.  And it was actually a nice sunny day.  I would hate to see how bad the ride was on a day when there were thunderstorms.  I think I would have to take the bus.  Anyway, my family, our luggage and I made the journey from Tacoma, Washington to Fargo, North Dakota pretty much no worse for wear.  Could the trip have been better?  Obviously, yes.  But we made it.  And, what is more important, our luggage made it.  Of course, I am not saying anything about our connecting ride to travel to my parents’ house.  My brother Jethro was supposed to pick us up.  Naturally, he wasn’t there to meet us.  I figured he might have taken a detour along the way to stop at one or two taverns.  Of course, they don’t call them taverns in North Dakota.  They call them bars.  No. They don’t call them bars because the building is filled with a bunch of metal bars or the building has windows made of bars.  Come to think of it, I’m not really sure why they call them bars.  I guess it’s because a bar has come to be defined as a counter across which alcoholic drinks or refreshments are served.  We ended up waiting about an hour and a half before he finally showed up to pick us up.  Since he was late and my wife and I didn’t want to sit at the airport, we called up one of my other brothers who lived in Fargo to see if he could pick us up and take us to his house.  If you’ve ever been to the airport in Fargo, North Dakota, you will understand why we did that.  Other than that small fiasco at the airport, we experienced no exercises in futility with our trip from Washington to North Dakota.

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