I consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur of the service academies at this point. I am third gen Navy, and my father taught at (and graduated from) the Naval Academy when I was a kid, so to some extent it was my old stomping grounds. In fact, the coldest I've ever felt while camping was on a Naval Academy practice field in February, though I have camped in far colder weather since, with better gear. My brother-in-law teaches at West Point, where they have an active scouting program as well. Based on my experience at all three, I would say that the Naval Academy has the best pools, West Point has the best COPE courses, and the Air Force Academy has the best golf course, as fitting of each of their respective areas of expertise.

All kidding aside, the Air Force Academy grounds are beautiful and huge, and vastly dwarf the Naval Academy, which is crammed into one of the swampiest corners of Annapolis. Their campsite for scouting was about perfect; excellent tree cover, level ground, and a relatively short distance from the parking lot. The only real challenge was that the Santa Fe tracks were maybe 100 yards away at best, and that is an annoyingly busy freight line at night. One of the other Dads who I like quite a bit was an Air Force pilot, since retired and teaching at a local high school. He's been able to arrange our use of the facilities with the base for the last couple of years now, and may have been why we got the extra special tour.

I was reminded of how crazy young everyone there is, and conversely how old I have become. One of the guys who had just graduated, and I guess commissioned, took us on the tour of the sail plane hangar. Very bright young man, hanging out for some sort of pilot school training or the other. He was telling us how he graduated at the top of his class, and hoping he would have his choice of duty station so he could be assigned to the same base as his girlfriend. Both me and Air Force Dad immediately said 'Yeah, maybe don't do that' at the same time. I also added the life lesson they provided us at boot for good measure, which was 'Don't marry a stripper'.