Megan Kirkpatrick of Cary was thrilled when she learned her son would be coming home in March after six months of being on a Navy aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.

She and her ex-husband, Jim Schmidt, of Apex, flew to Hawaii to greet their son, David Schmidt, a 2003 Green Hope High School graduate.

"The ship comes around the corner slowly at about 8 o'clock in the morning," says Kirkpatrick. "There were mothers there holding babies that the fathers had not yet seen. And then there were mothers like me, just crying."

It gets better. Kirkpatrick and Schmidt later took part in a military program that lets family and friends of sailors ride travel with them on the aircraft carrier.

But first they survived a scare in Hawaii.

Once David Schmidt, 25, docked, it took nearly three hours for him to disembark. "The first thing he wants to do, of course, is to go eat," says Kirkpatrick. After so many months at sea, David wanted fresh foods - sushi, fruits, vegetables, eggs. The three tooled around downtown Honolulu the entire day before heading back to the hotel.

"By the time we checked in, we see all these people with loads of food and tons of bottled water," says Kirkpatrick. "We had not heard about the earthquake in Japan."

Soon the Hawaiian Islands were on alert.

You could hear tsunami alarms going off all night. I thought, 'If I'm going to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience with a tsunami, I'm going to be awake and I'm going to have my camera ready.'"

Kirkpatrick stayed up until 4 a.m., but Oahu was spared any surges.

A few days later, all three boarded the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln for the five-day cruise to San Diego, Calif. The opportunity for family and friends to accompany sailors on aircraft carriers is relatively rare. The military calls the voyages Tiger Cruises.

Kirkpatrick knew it wouldn't be luxurious and she was right. The sleeping quarters were especially tight.

"The rack - you couldn't even hold your book up. It's a triple bunk. It's almost like a coffin," she says. "You have a little curtain that you pull across on the outer side, but you have to slither in headfirst and you have to slink out feet first. I was in the middle bunk so every time I got in or out, my hip would rake over the steel step that was intended for the person who would be on the third bunk."

The ship itself was enormous, its dimensions difficult to digest. The Navy's Nimitz-class supercarrier, as it's called, is more than 1,000 feet long and houses more than 5,600 crew and 90 fixed-wing planes and helicopters.

The proud Navy mom also got a taste, literally, of what life had been like for David the past six months.

"The food was not bad when we left because they had been able to replenish with beautiful fresh fruit from the islands," she says. "But by day three or four I was seeing food reserved between lunch and dinner and I was thinking, 'I can't eat that again. You may think you've camouflaged that, but I recognize it.' David kept saying, 'Mom, it's still better than normal.'"

She and her ex-husband enjoyed the ship tours the most, particularly seeing the shop where their son works as an avionics technician.

"The next time my son goes out to sea," she says, "I'll be able to visualize exactly where he is and what it's like."