Our First PCS Move

What. a. whirlwind. I can't believe that just a week ago, I was in North Carolina celebrating Thanksgiving with these cuties:

(Happy Belated 2nd Birthday, Noa!!!!)

Nan took this beaut' of the two of us:

I guess time flies when you are PCSing.

The day after Thanksgiving, we drove 9 hours back to Florida from NC. Upon arrival in Florida (around 5:30PM), we got a call from Budget Rentals telling us that our reservation we'd had for a moving truck for weeks could not be honored. Cue well-founded rage and mad crazy scramble to find a new moving truck on one of the busiest moving weekends of the year. Luckily, we found the last 17' moving truck in the greater Daytona Beach area that night around 9:00PM. 

On Saturday morning, at 7:00AM, Will picked up our Uhaul and got to loading it (along with his dad) with our belongings that had been in storage for the past 7 weeks . . . 

It's like a very large, very expensive 3D puzzle.

and off we went on the 1,000 mile drive.

Little Billy take the wheeeeel. (That's my little brother.) 

We made a couple pit stops, one night in Macon, GA and one night in Nashville. On Sunday morning (1st Sunday of Advent!!!), we attended Mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Macon. It was a gorgeous church and Mass, and was a much needed calm period during the storm of the move.

Right?!

We then promptly hit up Starbucks for some PSLs (naturally), when we discovered that Ace was sitting on our Advent calendar in the back seat of our car.

Those poor dogs were pretty cramped the whole trip, but they were great! And yes, we're eating the chocolates from the Advent calendar anyway.

From Macon, things got wild. As in, we stopped at Ikea in the heart of Atlanta to purchase a new couch cover and coffee table. The former was destroyed by our dogs, while the latter was destroyed by the infamous Neddy-bear (Will's dad, Ned) during the move. We managed to make it out of Ikea in under two hours, which I attribute to the grace of God received at Mass earlier that day, but I digress . . . .

We spent our second night on the road in Nashville. Will met up with a law school friend for a couple of drinks while I refused to put on pants (sorry, Courtney!!) and watched another disappointing Redskins loss with a Wendy's frosty in hand. (I was a vision of beauty, I'm sure.) At this point, we were thoroughly pooped, and still had 5 more hours of driving ahead of us.

Daisy also refused pants.

We left the hotel the first thing the next morning (not too too hard thanks to the time change!) and headed to Scott. We came in from the east, so it was a boring drive, which we didn't mind after driving through the heart of Atlanta and the winding Tennessee mountain roads in the dead of night!

Lots of flat farmland.

We figured we made it to the right place when we approached the base entrance flanked with four massive Air Force planes.

You think we made it to the right place? 

We arrived on base at about 1:00PM, got visitors passes so that I could drive our car on, and went straight to the JAG office to meet Will's sponsor (i.e., a poor coworker who was assigned to answer all of our many many questions!), commanding officer, and coworkers. Everyone was really friendly, and I got to see Will's very own office, complete with a large window, to the outside world! (Anyone working in government straight out of law school will understand this is a rare and amazing privilege.)

His work building.

We left to go to the housing office to go check out our new house (more on that later . . . but suffice it to say I'm about to get all Young House Love up in here).

It is a far cry from our apartment days.

It wasn't the floor plan we were initially told we would get, and was two stories instead of one. The dogs ran up and down the steps 27 times within 15 minutes. I think we'll all get used to it! ;)

We then checked in to the Scott Inn for that night's lodging arrangements (kind of icky - glad it was only for one night). We signed our lease first thing the next morning and started moving into our house, which was just on Tuesday, in addition to doing all those other fun military things (i.e., registering with DEERS, getting ID cards, enrolling in health insurance, registering the dogs on base, etc. etc. etc.).

Things are NOWHERE NEAR settled down, but we obviously did manage to have our Internet installed, which is why I get to over share our experience with you all.

Joy for you and me!