Work Trip to NAS

Recently my team took a chartered bus down to Norfolk to view a couple of ships. I’m not exactly sure who funded this trip, but probably Big Daddy D. My senior boss used to be a Captain in the Navy and through his connections we got to board a ship and check out the quarters and inner workings of this ship. Interestingly enough, even though I’ve grown up in the military and lived around the largest Naval base in the world, I’ve never boarded a ship before. To say the living quarters and areas are tiny is an understatement!

We had to get up and be at the office by 6am on that Tuesday morning. Thankfully I just live up the street so I cabbed it down. Our account, or rather, Big Daddy D, provided breakfast and the transportation down to Naval Station Oceania.  We hit no traffic and got all the way down there in 2.5 hours. That MUST be a record to get from DC to Norfolk!  It was weird to be going back to my hometown with my co-workers!

It was actually September 10^th, the day before 9/11, so our boss shared with us his story of 9/11 and how there was a ship near his reign that looked like it had a bomb on it. He told us his story of how this one ship almost caused him to shoot it because they thought it was another terrorist attack. I never knew he was so high up in the Navy, but it was cool to hear about his experiences!

Anyway, we got to the area and boarded the ship. It was really neat to see the inner workings of how everything was ran for both the officers and enlisted. They described how things worked when the ship was just in regular duty and then how things were different when they were out on a mission.

We got to see the quarters, kitchen, and various other places such as the equipment area. They took us up to mission control area and all of the navigation machines. We also got to go up on deck and check out their machine guns. Kind of weird to think that sometimes 19 year olds are responsible for 4 million dollar machinery. I sure didn’t have that kind of responsibility when I was only 19!

Anyways, we had a great time and even made fantastic time on the way home too! Of course Big Daddy D paid for drinks on the bus on the way home! Needless to say my team and I partook in some singing karaoke style on the way home. Oh the magic of cell phones and one teammate who can essentially remember any word to any song ever! We had a blast! Things like this make me like working for Big Daddy D, save any of the other b-s that goes along with it.

Oh well, you can’t win them all.

Enjoy some pictures of the ship!
 

BIG GUNS!!!!

And my team mates at the back of the bus drinking and singing karaoke!!