I was too young to really be excited or scared by the trip; even though I was barely three years old, I had been around large airplanes from day one (hello... born in an Air Force hospital) so the idea of getting on a plane was exciting only in the sense that it seemed neat b/c it was like mommy & I were going to work with daddy.

My parents tell me that I was perfectly fine with the trip, except for the length of it. The Google map shows a travel line from Seattle to Honolulu then on to Tokyo then Naha, but we flew via an itinerary containing both civilian/commercial and military charter flights... I think we went from Grissom to San Francisco, then to Hawai'i, then Guam, and nonstop from Guam to Okinawa, but I can't be sure.

What I do know is that one of the most powerful memories of my early life occurred somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. I remember looking out the window and not understanding what I was seeing. I asked my daddy what the cotton balls were doing down there and what the stuff below the cotton balls was, and when he explained that those were clouds floating above the ocean, I remember being... stunned. Not scared in the slightest, but stunned that it was actually possible to fly above the clouds. It was a defining moment in my childhood -- one of those "wow, I'm really small and the world is really big" moments. Truly magical.