The Airshow

The Great Chautauqua Airshow was held this year from August 21-23. Like last year, my squadron helped out, mainly with parking and flight line. We bivouacked out on the airport hill. For those three days, we were doing Volunteer Service. We worked till our poor little feet hurt, and then worked some more. We worked in the rain and mud. We made it our Civic Duty to perform these acts with a minimum of sarcastic-comment-making towards the dweebs dear people we were parking. Why, we were practically Public Servants. (Freebie: that phrase is a very good attention-getter. People will be very impressed if you use that phrase about yourself, but you do have to use the proper tone.)

I arrived around noon on Friday, with my tent, air mattress, and overnight stuff. Cadets trickled in, and we set up our campsite, and tried to figure out what we were doing. (That last item was a futile, week-end-long effort, incidentally.) The gates opened around 1600 [Ed. note: This means 4:00 PM. JLS], and we were ready. We had a couple cadets down near the road, a cadet along the parking driveway, and a couple cadets in the pond field, parking people. With all disrespect, these people (for reasons unknown to us, because we had vests on and all they had to do was what we were telling them to do, so you would have though it was fairly simple) had relatively no clue what they were doing.

The people organizing the airshow took about 5 of the cadets (including the cadet commander, deputy cadet commander) for flight line, so yours truly inherited the rest of the cadets and the parking stuff. Parking an airshow with roughly 7 cadets is a logistical nightmare, and that is all I shall share with you on that. I had fun, though, and all my cadets had meals at regular intervals (which is a good thing.)

Friday, we managed to not have rain. (It was wet and dewy for PT in the morning though.) But on Saturday, in the afternoon, it let go and rained! We said to ourselves, "Selves, we frankly don't care about the five vehicles who will pull in during this deluge. We are going to go sit in the quansit hut with some other unfortunate drowned rats until it is over with." And so we did. It only lasted 15 minutes, and then we went back out to our posts and parked and unparked people.

It also rained Sunday morning, and Sunday afternoon. We once again got wet, but this time, we said to ourselves, "Selves, we frankly don't care that water is running down our backs -- it's not deluging, so we are going to stay out here and park cars. However, we are going to put our blouses back on to avoid severe hypothermic reactions to the rain and wind." And so we did.

Then Sunday evening, when it was all over at 1600 [Ed. note: this also means 4 PM], we packed up our stuff, loaded our soggy selves into our parents' vehicles, and went home and took showers.