Hello, Seattle!

Well.. technically Fort Lewis actually. But I couldn't resist the Owl City reference. We are definitely in Seattle area though.

After a crazy 4 days of driving and a pretty rough start*, we finally drove into Seattle area on Monday afternoon. And we were welcomed with a pretty hard rainfall. Ah.. Seattle. Way to live up to your reputation.

But the rain can't be that bad, because apparently Fort Lewis is the most requested base in the Army. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. I can see why now because the area is beautiful. We are less than a few hours drive from either the city, beach, or mountains. Amazing.

So we are now currently apartment hunting.** James is actually right now at a meeting about housing on base, because we haven't ruled that out. If we lived on base though, we wouldn't get James' housing allowance in his paycheck (but our housing would be free). And if we lived off-base we could find a place for less than what his allowance is. But he would have to drive further. We will see.

So right now I'm at the Rainier Inn, which is temporary lodging on base. It's basically a nice hotel room with a stove and fridge. I don't know the base yet, so I decided to go exploring in the best way: I went running! I ran by the airfield and got to see some chinook and blackhawk helicopters! It was pretty cool. I don't feel too bad about taking some time off running during all this, because I'm pretty sure I hurt my achilles a little in that half marathon. It does feel good to stretch my legs though, after being in that uhaul so long.

After we settle down and actually find an apartment, I'm going to have a lot of time. It's weird to not have a job. I'm not used to wearing casual clothes this many days in a row. There are tons of little coffee shops all over the place so I'm going to start trying them out. I loove coffee.

We also found out that once James gets down with in-processing (about 6 days of Army paperwork), things are going to start happening really fast. He is going to have to go to a bunch of training to get ready for his deployment, which could be anytime in December. So I'm not sure how often I'm actually going to see him. For now, I get to see him after he gets down with his paperwork for the day though, which is usually before noon. So I'm just going to enjoy that for now and not think about the deployment.

Random footnotes:
*we actually had one of James' duffel bags stolen from us right off his parent's front yard while we were packing, hit some crazy traffic on I-80 that set us back about 5 hours, and at one point couldn't find a hotel room because of a nebraska/wyoming college football game that had sold out every hotel in a 90 mile radius.
**Apparently most people don't have don't have AC here.. just heat. Even though it gets up to the 80s in the summertime. Hmmm.