Holidays = no work = yay!

This week was just as hard as any, but it got done early for both of us so there was much rejoicing. Ellen got off at noon Tuesday and I got out at noon Wednesday. I flew once this week but did a couple simulator flights. Things just keep getting added on to every flight. I'm still working on getting a hang of all the radio calls and remembering to do all the little checks here and there. The Air Force is full of these acronyms for every bloody detail. So you can be going through a practice emergency procedure situation, and only use about 2 pages in the checklist, but between those two pages, you end up having to remember like 10 acronyms (some of which are acronyms FOR other acronyms!). It gets a tad excessive.

The military is also very vague about VFR (Visual/good weather conditions) vs IFR (instrument / cloudy weather) which is strange for me to get used to coming from civilian flying. Every training flight includes parts under IFR and parts under VFR and you don't even realize it because of the way they apply the rules. A lot of manuals refer to "standard cloud separation minimums", yet I've never found what that means in the military regs.

Only about 8 flights left until we're supposed to solo, a little intimidating...

Ellen and I spent most of the weekend hanging out and relaxing. We went easy on the Thanksgiving dinner since we already had turkey etc twice in the last month. Around base is pretty empty since a lot of people went to Dallas or are visiting home. For the first time, weather dropped too so things don't seem as chipper and bright. It went from about 87 one day to 38 the next.

Yesterday, we decided to take a trip up to the Wichita Mountains near Lawton, OK. We were originally going to take the motorcycle, but since it got colder and we weren't sure how much hiking we would be doing, we opted for the car. I had heard people joke that the Wichita Mtns are more of just a few hills and no big deal. But the website and online reviews said it was a really nice place. It turned out to be amazing. The mountains were pretty good-sized in our opinion (bigger than just a few hills at least). But the really great part about it was the wildlife. Maybe it was because of the cooler, darker weather, or maybe it was because it's not the summer season when there's so many people going through the park. But either way, there were a ton of animals. We had been disappointed when we went to Caprock Canyons because it was a refuge and bragged about the wildlife on the website. But when we got there, the only real wildlife was tucked away in pens out of public sight. Wichita Mountains sounded the same on the website, but when we got there, it was a really huge spread of plains and mountains with animals everywhere. There were random fence lines here and there but we weren't sure what their purpose was.

We drove around most of the park, but spent a couple hours climbing up one of the mountains. We started on the trail, but then a lot of other groups were following along and making too much noise. So we took a turn and went over the rocks to see some good nature. We got our first Texas snow while we were there. It was only a little bit of dried up hale but we'll still count it. As we were driving around, we saw a herd of buffalo twice. The first time, they were just grazing next to the road in an open field. The second time was when we were leaving and they were crossing the road in a wooded area. A bunch of cars were all stopped and we were in the middle. It was pretty crazy since they were right next to our window. A couple of them broke out in a fight and that's when we decided to start moving on before we got a dent in our new Highlander. We saw a lot of deer and elk roaming through the woods. We stopped at one area which was literally a prairie dog community. There were a few dozen of them all in this small little area full of holes. We ran into a group of ugly looking wild turkeys. And at the top of the list, we saw the animal that I had really been looking forward to finding ever since we went to Caprock. We were driving down a long road that had lightly wooded area on either side. About a half mile ahead, we saw a short animal crossing the road that looked sort of like a coyote or wolf trotting along. But when we got closer and stopped to see it, it turned out to be a bobcat! We were really surprised at how non-ferocious looking it was, but it was unmistakable with the pointy ears and cat-like body. Of course, none of our photos of the bobcat came out because it was that perfect time of dusk when there's not enough light for anything to be in focus. Lastly, we saw some famous Texas Longhorns as we were leaving. Big animals they were.

On our way home, we also stopped by Ft Sill just to see what it was like on an Army base. Turned out to be pretty lame. It was dark out but the entire base had HORRIBLE lighting. We were on this main road and there were barely any street lights. We felt like we were just driving through an empty city. So maybe we'll go back sometime when there's natural light out.

Here's some good shots from the Wichita Mountains and adventures with Rembrant.
http://neiu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2014649&l=2752e&id=77800450

Here's our first attempt at putting a video on the blog, so cross your fingers- (it's 4 mb so it may take a couple minutes to load)