As with all things with the Army, our life is a lot of hurry up and wait, and then HURRY UP!!!
When it comes to moving a military family there are some good things about it, for example, the Army sends in packers to pack up your entire life and then put it on a truck and move it for you. There are good and bad things about this, as you can imagine, for example the packing can get creative. What do you mean you wouldn't have packed a trash can full of trash? Why would you expect all of your kitchen utensils to be together? What's wrong with finding a few dispersed between boxes of your kids toys? Anyway, it gets done...and yes there are casualties of items along the way but that's life...don't worry I do have a good hissy fit (perhaps a few) every move.
To get to that point of watching packers like a hawk, you must have your PCS (Permanent Change of Station) orders in your hand in order to go to the transportation office on Post to make any plans of getting your things from one home to another. Needless to say, this is where the hurry up and wait part comes in.
Bryan has had his report date for work for awhile, and it was at the end of June....the first week of June there were still no orders....but we had a house to move into and we knew the schools that the kids would be attending in the fall. The kids got out of school at the end of the first week in June, and we still had no idea when we were leaving. I was able to sign Brendan up for the Extended School Year program in Texas at the very last minute, and he was thrilled because he still got to ride the bus and his teacher was someone he LOVED! So off he went to school, and then we got the orders, and finally got the transportation orders done. Let's just say 7 days is plenty of time to get moved!
Exactly one week after getting orders, there were 3 packers in our house packing up all of our worldly possessions, and after 2 days of that, the moving truck arrived and that would be the day we would find out when out things would be delivered to our new house! Now, we had pulled enough clothes and items to be without a house full of stuff for a week, everything else was boxed up and ready to be put on a truck!
Well, when a crate truck shows up instead of a moving truck, you know that things just went downhill. What's a crate truck you ask......
It's literally a trailer with wooden crates on it that your stuff gets loaded into and then it gets nailed shut and off it goes on it's adventure. This adventure for our crates will take 3 weeks! That's what we get for trying to do a move during the height of moving season for the military! It was a shock to us since we had given them a destination address and no mention had been made that this would be anything other than a door to door move, but oh well! There was nothing we could do, so I had a good meltdown then sent our things on their way, and then the next morning, we were on our way too!
Off to our new adventure...and yes that is a HUGE mound of dirt in our front yard! We left mid-progress in our new retaining wall construction!
