The Joys of PCSing...Anywhere.

We made it to Alaska! I still cannot believe we made it in one piece. The drive to Alaska through the US and Canada was amazing. I doubt we will ever drive through Canada again as it is expensive and Americans are not their favorites. I think we will take the ferry next time and fly the pooches. The dogs did great on the drive. It was so nice to see friends and family along the way! We packed a big cooler full of food and ate on that most of the way through Canada because everything was so expensive with the taxes.

Before we left Ft. Gordon the lovely finance department told us that since this was OCONUS that we would only get reimbursed for one vehicle and we could not ship one because it was too late. Awesome. They also told my husband to sell his truck and just buy another one when he gets to Alaska. Luke replied, "why would I sell a vehicle that is already paid off?" My husband will never sell his truck. So we ended up driving both of our cars the 5500 miles. My husbands truck does have 250,000+ miles on it and it did great! When we arrived at Ft. Wainwright and we went in to transportation and finance departments here, they said the Ft. Gordon departments have no idea what they were talking about and we got mileage for both vehicles. Next time we will talk to the departments where we are headed.

Housing...the bane of my existence. When we first got orders for Ft. Wainwright we called the housing office up here and they told us a year based on rank. We kept an eye on http://www.ahrn.com/ for rentals. When we got up here and met with housing we were again told a year and given no hope because we were 35 on the list with nothing scheduled to open. So we went house hunting. Most of the places up here in our BAH were very dirty. We ended up finding a place that was 1000 square feet but it was clean. We put a deposit down. Two weeks after we got here we got a call from housing letting us know that they had a house for us on post and if we wanted it. My husband didn't know what to say. Long story short we accepted the house on post and luckily we got our deposit back. We are still waiting to move into the home. We really have no idea how we moved up on the list or what the deal was. Somethings we will never figure out.