Top Guns

For the past couple of days I've been at the BD meeting held off-site in one of the hotels in Alexandria. There are only 5 women attending and we have (at times) found it pretty hilarious!! We did introductions on the first morning. Rudy kicked it off and asked people to give a brief resume...as we went round the table it pretty quickly became apparent that most of the guys had been aviators, some were naval aviators....but almost to a man they had flown something! And the tales were getting more elaborate as we went round the table...who was shot down, who was shot down more than once, picked up by a carrier and ended up drinking the marine corp under the table, who had flown a washing machine into combat and still managed to single-handedly win the war.... Even the 3 naval bods were getting in on the action - if someone had ditched into the water, you can guarantee that it was the naval bods little boat that had picked them up! This was willy-waving to a degree that I have never experienced before!!! The air was thick with testosterone!

Tanner and I had done our bit, and we were onto another tale of heroics from the fly boys when Tanner wrote me a note saying "I didn't give my background - oops" and I replied "well, I didn't either. It wasn't interesting cos I didn't fly F-18's". I was proud to say that I wasn't able to do willy-waving, but I was able to do reasonably funny and got the biggest laugh of the intro round...

But can you imagine the comments after this hour of machismo when we ladies went to the ladies?? Alyssa was so funny..."Oh my god, look how huge mine in, its way bigger than yours"...

Anyway, these are a bunch of guys who have tales to tell. One of them flew the planes in Hot Shots (the Top Gun spoof), another was a test pilot...too many tales to tell! Interesting guys. Very respectful of us ladies. And all with names like Chip, Zim and Wolfie.

We've been out on the lash with them for two nights now. Tonight was a little more sedate (well we left early, so it may have degenerated by now!), but last night was pretty boozy. We went to O'Connells (the Irish bar on King St), and I had to do the obligatory flirting with the Irish manager to get us a table with a view of the plasma TV screen so we could watch Scotland winning at rugby. As the bill was pretty huge I hope that we get a decent table next time we visit!!