Roughing It

I am sitting here with my laptop, another gorgeous, cool-ish day, listening to two P-51s fly over, with a fridge full of cold beverages and a couple of Oreo cookies in my hand. The kids are playing nicely, we are all freshly showered and sunscreened up, and life is good.

Did you know they have a laundry service out here at Camp Schoeller here at Oshkosh? They'll come pick up your dirty laundry from your camp site, take it, wash it, and bring it back, delivering your clean clothes to your tent or trailer.

This morning I had homemade scrambled eggs, hash browns and fruit for breakfast in my lawn chair in front of my trailer.

As I said, we're roughing it. ;)

This morning I felt like a little more space than our shower provides, so I went into the "What is more important to me at this moment...space or privacy?" self-discussion. I decided to try the main public shower area this time. When I got in there, I was the only person in my row of showers, and there was another lady on another row of showers. *YES!* They also added benches right in front of the showers, and there are hooks on the outside, so the necessity of walking around sans clothing in public is greatly reduced. That works for me. I did forget to bring my flip flops though, and I don't enjoy walking barefoot on public shower facilities. Eh, oh well. So far so good anyway. And then two more women came in, and one of them went in the shower right next to me. Now, aren't there rules of etiquette for this?? It's like bathroom stalls-you don't pick the one right next to someone unless the others are all full! (If you didn't know that already, please take note.) ;) Anyway, the showers are clean and very tall, and while it's still not my top choice to try to get dressed either in a turned-off shower while trying not to get your clothes wet before you get them on (try putting on pants with wet feet on a wet floor) or by stepping out of the shower and getting dressed in the dry but very public area, it's not bad...

I found out today that I didn't win the "Ride with the Aeroshell T-6 Aerobatic Team Over Oshkosh" give-away for Monday. I entered a couple of us hoping to win, but to no avail. I am heartbroken and distressed now, because I don't know when I'd ever get an opportunity to fly aerobatics in a T-6 again. ;) Seriously, that would have been a lot of fun though. I don't normally enter contests, but I had to enter that one. You never know. I even know the person who did win it-not personally, but off of a pilot message board-so it was close. ;)

Nathan arrived around noon our time. We had taken the golf cart and made it all the way over to "Fighter Town" where the warbirds are parked, and we were hanging out by the T-6 crew. Nathan's T-6 was there along with two others that the guys had finished up, and we were just hanging out there waiting to see Nathan fly over so we could go over to the Mustang area and pick him up. As we were sitting there, Chuck suddenly sits up and says "That sounds like our airplane." Sure enough, we heard a Mustang shutting down, so we drove on over there, and there he was. We never saw or heard him fly over or taxi by, but we heard his engine sputtering and popping on shut down. Perfect timing-we arrived as they were exiting the airplane. :) We grabbed lunch at the warbird tent, went back and secured the airplane and wiped it clean of bugs and fingerprints, then came back to the trailers to hang out, relax, tune in the hand-held radios and listen to Oshkosh tower traffic, and do our thing.

We got the golf cart through the gates today, something we won't be able to do from tomorrow on most likely. We still had to have the wristbands to get in, and they still had gate-keepers, but today they were a little more lax on the golf carts than they will be. So we didn't even have to walk all the way from camping to warbirds. Thankfully. That's a looong hike. Anyway, as we were driving along on the golf cart, we were a little surprised at how many people were out milling around. Oshkosh hasn't even technically started yet, but you could fool me by all the people out there already. You know, in a matter of a few days, Camp Schoeller alone goes from acres of empty field/grass to a literal city about the size of Kokomo. Very impressive.

Well, it was dinner out with the Davis boys and time to come back and relax awhile before bed. We've enjoyed watching all the planes come in, fly over, land, and park. Oshkosh is looking pretty full...