Day 2: Opelousas, LA to Oklahoma City, OK
This was the longest driving day, about 8-and-some-change hours worth of driving, along with 2 more hours worth of numerous stops and traffic/construction issues in Dallas.
Dave slept 9 hours Friday night. He asked that nothing wake him up — neither alarm clock nor my noise — so I let him sleep.
…and sleep….
Day 1 = Navarre, FL to Opelousas, LA
Being that this is our 3rd move since I started this blog 5 1/2 years ago, I will attempt to write a diary of sorts of our 4 day not-quite-although-it-feels-like-it cross-country drive between the Florida Panhandle and Colorado Springs.
Day 1 for us was supposed to be a “short” drive. In a good-old-fashioned military change of command, the outgoing commander says a farewell/thank you speech, ceremoniously gives up his guidon to the new commander, and then beats feet out of the area.
Dave had been saying for the past several weeks, “You’ll have to pry the guidon out of my cold, dead hands!”. He was joking…but you wouldn’t know if from this picture, would you? Photo: Michael Bruenning.
For those who might not have realized, my husband’s new Air Force job will be as a faculty member in the Physics Department at the Air Force Academy.
On our house hunting trip to Colorado, it took us about 48 hours to choose our house and enter a contract. That was our goal. The rest of our time in the area was spent fulfilling assorted appointments, and we had a couple hours here and there to kill between appointments. In addition, both Dave and I had meetings on the Air Force Academy campus. Dave met with his new department, and I met with someone about trying to get a Reserve job.
The weather was beautiful, so we took some time to see the Visitors Center and hike the trail to the chapel and see the cadet area.
The kids were 4 months and 2 years old the last time they had to do this. In 2005 Jacob’s favorite house was the one with the toys in the living room for him to play with. We didn’t choose this pictured house, it was way overpriced.
Since I started my blog in late 2007, the house-hunting experience for our family had been pretty basic: Dave would fly out to the next destination and choose a rental home for the family. I’d stay with the kids.
For Dave, it was a whirlwind trip, but he could complete everything in as little as 48 hours…not just securing a new house, but also getting the boys registered for school.
This next assignment to Colorado Springs would be for a longer tour than the past two, so we elected to buy a house this time.
It was a tough decision, but we decided to bring the whole family on this particular househunting trip. We found a gap in the boys’ baseball schedule in early May that would allow us to take a long weekend and fly the family to Colorado; we would all shop for the next house together.
We were in contact with a realtor that a local friend here recommended, and she worked with us for several weeks in advance to hone our preferences and she has a list of ten houses waiting for us to view by the first weekend of May.
One of the houses went into contract right away so that left 9 houses to view. It was a very long day, and my head was swimming by the end. Ironically, we chose the one house that didn’t have an already-finished basement. The lower price made it appealing and we could apply some of the cost savings to finishing it ourselves to our liking.
The kids were great sports about it. They were exhausted by the end (the high elevation not helping things) but had many inputs.
It was a delicate balance of size, price, layout, schools and distance to our work locations. We chose a lovely house in the northeast part of Colorado Springs, centrally located. The boys can walk to their elementary schools, but will be bused or driven to middle and high school. But even the middle and high schools are closer than the kids are from their current schools.
We can’t wait to make our new house a “home” in the coming weeks.
Happy Birthday Howie!
I’m over a month late, but better late than never!
Happy 13th birthday to our dear Howie. He’s still going strong, ironically, his latest medical ailment was an infected hot spot on his tail, of all things (that’s for another post).
I was in the middle of Operation EAT WHAT WE HAVE, so I made a butter cake from scratch and used homemade frosting and some of the tubed blue icing to write the words. I didn’t have much blue icing left. Feel free to compare my cake with Harry Potter’s:
My cake…
…versus Hagrid’s cake for Harry!
It’s tradition.
Whenever I fly to Nebraska for my Air Force Reserve duties**, I tend to rotate among the three airlines that fly between my local airports here and Omaha: Delta, American and United.
**Once we get to Colorado, flying to my Air Force duties will no longer be my only option. I’m very excited about this.
On my last trip to Nebraska in late April, I flew American Airlines and had a three-hour layover in Dallas-Fort Worth. As it turned out, my connecting gate was across the hall from the airport’s USO.
Typically, my layovers are VERY tight…less than an hour. Also, in an airport as big as DFW, to be so close to the USO was pure luck.
For those unfamiliar, USO lounges are set up in many airports mainly for the servicemembers on official travel. However, family members and retirees are free to use the facilities. In Dallas, the USO lounge would put many airlines’ VIP lounges to shame! A computer lab, kids’ play area, snack bar (you’re allowed up to three snacks/beverages free of charge), and a HUGE theater area with comfy seating.
I had been to this particular USO before, but since my last visit (2009, I believe), it had nearly doubled in size.
This time around, I met a family who was awaiting their connecting flight after having flown 10 hours from Germany. The kids were so tired, they were just plain silly! I also met several uniformed soldiers coming home from Afghanistan for their two-week R&R trip. I also met a very young female Air Force officer assigned to Holloman AFB, NM, I asked how she liked it and I’d never seen someone so happy to be in New Mexico. Good for her 🙂
There’s a luggage area that’s conveniently covered with carpeting. Why? So you can attach your velcro patches to the walls. I had no unit patches (my uniform doesn’t use velcro patches), but I had my name tape on my backpack…which is what I left behind.
The cubbies on the left easily accommodated the carry on bags we all had.
I know it was silly, but I did start a garden here this spring. In part because we did a Cub Scout den project that involved planting seedlings. I ended up with several leftovers and I just stuck them in my garden plot.
Enjoy some pictures of the modest little harvest I might have had if it weren’t for all the bugs and birds that helped themselves first.
I planted the garden in late March. By May it was looking fantastic! Too bad the birds thought so too.
I let the birdseed grow some:
Sunflowers!
Crookneck squash. Timmy was very interested in how squash grew…too bad he doesn’t like squash.
I have quite a few tomatoes, and I’m sad about having to walk away from them all in a couple weeks.
This kept us busy today.
Today was the day. A great big truck pulled up to our house and picked up about 99% of our belongings.
Yeah, we’ve done this before…but it’s still a really big deal, and really exhausting, despite the gentlemen from the moving company physically hauling everything out of the house.
I can’t believe this is the THIRD military move I’ve been through since I started this blog in 2008. Here are pictures from the 2008 move, and more pictures about our 2010 move.
I’ve been scarce lately, even though I have lots of pictures and stories of this past month to share. From Colorado to the kids’ baseball to our wrapping up the school year here. But for this post, we’ll talk about our moving adventure so far.
Technically, Dave is assembling our AcuRite sensor set here, but you can just pretend the drill is unscrewing rather than screwing. Ha ha.
This afternoon Dave disassembled our two weather stations in the backyard. One of them (KFLGULFB11) had been reliably reporting backyard weather since December 2010, the other (KFLNAVAR18) was a test weather station whose review post is coming up soon on GeekMom.
Our Davis Instruments weather station sensor set is beginning to get rather tired. I predict we’ll be getting a new one by the end of the year.
You can view the archives for these two weather stations through our Weather Underground pages:
We will retire these two names and will be resuscitating the weather stations in July in Colorado!
I’m sorry we didn’t have more fanfare or photography with this, but it’s really busy around here, the packers will be here TOMORROW!
These buildings looked like bongo drums to me. This particular part of the museum wasn’t quite open yet.
During our week in Biloxi this past March, Dave and I took a drive to Ocean Springs, which has done a fantastic job of rebuilding after Katrina’s devastation.
On the drive, we passed the most unusual-looking buildings near the Isle and Palace Casinos. There were three buildings in a row up against U.S. 90, each of which had very distinctive architecture.
The sign along the highway read “Ohr-O’Keefe Museum“…about which I immediately assumed was a museum featuring America’s most famous O’Keeffe. But I was wrong.
While Dave was recovering from his eye surgery, I took a couple hours and paid a visit to the museum. Despite its unusual appearance, inside those buildings was some beautiful art!
The artist featured here is George E. Ohr, a Biloxi native who operated a very eccentric pottery shop. His standard pottery pieces began to take on some very wild appearances over the years. A large Ohr pottery collection is a permanent exhibit at the museum.
George Ohr was known for his wild mustache, and the sticker you receive with paid admission (to show that you’re a paid visitor) is of a giant mustache.
The “campus” to the Ohr-O’Keefe actually consists of five buildings total. You can read more about the architecture here, but I was intrigued by the modernist version of an antebellum “Shoo-Fly” to which one of the buildings was supposed to pay homage.
The roof of this building was supposed to be a “shoo fly” porch. If you read about the history of a shoo fly, you’ll shake your head too.
The five buildings provide numerous gallery spaces of assorted sizes. I had the opportunity to see four different artists’ exhibits. All of the exhibits had local connections, whether it was the artists’ hailing from Biloxi, or in one case, the medium was wood scavenged from Hurricane Katrina debris.
In addition to the exhibits, one of the buildings is the City of Biloxi Center for Ceramics. A fully operational ceramics workshop was in use when I was there, with artists actively throwing on the pottery wheels.
A very non-moderist building stands on the campus. It’s the Pleasant Reed Interpretive Center, which features local African-American historical artifacts. The original building was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, but has been rebuilt completely, thanks to numerous archives and photographs.
The Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art is about a 60-90 minute visit, admission is $8-10 per person and is on U.S. 90 just west of the bridge between Biloxi and Ocean Springs.
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