Allison: The New Epoch: Day 1

In the runup to Tech 1, Rob said that it seemed like after class was going to be a new epoch, because we couldn't even fathom planning our dive calendars beyond that date. And it was such a big thing hanging over our head. Well, I felt more or less the same way with the trip to Florida, though the extreme nervousness wasn't quite as extreme :) Even though class was not over, it seemed like the hard/scary part was, so completing day 3 marked, to me, the end of an era. We had all talked about sleeping in on Monday, but of course that didn't happen. I think I slept in until 7:15 instead of 6:45 :) That was fine, though, since we had to pack our stuff. Oy. It wasn't actually as painful as I imagined, but that might be because Rob was doing more than his fair share :) Then we met up with Kevin, and we called David Rhea to see if he could do lunch. He could, so we agreed to meet him in Gainesville a little before noon.

We had lunch at Moe's, a fast-ish food southwestern place, which is a small chain in Florida, I gather. It was pretty good. We had a lot of fun at lunch. David told us about his adventures in China, among other things. Having lunch with David definitely sort of swayed me towards Florida for any potential future cave classes (I have been more of a fan of MX, whereas Rob seems split between MX and FL). But it would be so fun to train with David again!

After lunch, we headed back to EE to return all of our gear, and settle the tab. Oy :P Actually it wasn't too bad. I won't have to sell a kidney after all. From there, we headed back to the airport, for our return trip. Of course our luggage was bit heavy on the way back (stupid neoprene socks on the drysuits take forever to dry!). Luckily Kevin has mystical powers like the ability to check 2 70 lb bags for free on Continental, so we did a swapperoo and were all set. The line to check in was inordinately slow. Contintental has these automated kiosks for checkin, but as far as I can tell, every single person there needed help from a person (and not just to check bags), so really, what's the point of an "automated" kiosk? For whatever reason, American just doesn't seem to have this problem. Their kiosks are always seamless. The trip back was actually not that terrible. On the first flight, Rob and I were seated together but without Kevin. We noted that it would have been much more fun if Kevin were there, so for the second leg Kevin jumped through some hoops to get us seats together. On the first leg, we were actually fed a small meal. Since we ususally fly American, being fed solid foods on a flight is quite exotic for us (for a time, AA was even charging $2 for a soda, which they have thankfully rolled back). On the second leg, Rob basically repeated to Kevin all of the discussions we had had on the first leg. Hehe. Then the boys fell asleep. The luggage was a bit slow coming out when we got back to SFO, but it worked out well since we had to wait for Kevin to return with his truck anyway. When we got home, I was so happy to see the kitties!! They were both in good health, and seemed happy to see us.