Racing C17s...

Where I'm from... Indiana... we don't see C17s everyday... or at all.

Yet now!  I see them and hear them everyday.  This may not be exciting to you.  To me, it is a thrill!!  The first time I heard one and saw one, I just stopped.  Mid-step, jaw dropped and I couldn't take my eyes off the sky.  They are amazing!!!  Lance didn't, and still doesn't, understand my admiration towards the big metal birds of the sky.  It amazes me that something so HUGE and heavy can stay up in the air for so long.  Because when I make a paper air plane that weighs a bigillion times less, it plummets to the ground in a matter of a second.

I have a terrible habit... I love to race the C17s.... Don't tell anyone.  To get from our base to another local base, I hop on the Autobahn.  Yes, that dreaded highway that Hitler built to move his military quicker.  It's still here. :)  And people still speed like bats out of hell on it!  If I'm lucky... sometimes as I merge onto the Autobahn, a C17 will be coming in for landing and I will see it in my review mirror in the distance!  Oh, happy day!  I rev engine and take off, following the bats out of hell!  I normally end up scaring myself and slow down but it is usually that the plane will leave me in the dust and I have lost our race.... But I still try!  And I love it...

I wonder if the day will come, where I will be like Lance and the other many military people around me... I'll become so accustom to the sound and the sight of C17s that they will start to disappear from my mind.  They will become a "fixture" in the military life that I lead....  I hope that I never become to numb... that I will always have the amazement and reverence that I hold for the military and the coolest, most awesome medal birds of the sky.