The Big Adventure - Part 1: Preparation

Since I have been less than diligent in the past giving you all the grimy details about what we were up to, I figured it would be best to start at the very beginning of this whole adventure and tell the story in full. So without further ado -

I fell head over heels for a dashing young country boy...ok wait I think you guys know that part already...fast forward a few short months/year-ish. We find out we're moving to Japan! First, excitement followed immediately by lots of stresses coming at us (i.e. "me" since Casey is always cool as a cucumber).

After quitting my job, planning a wedding that went off in a rain storm on a different coast, and packing up our apartment in Seattle, Casey and I hit the road with our trusty Camry loaded down for a pre-Japan mini-adventure to San Diego. Most of the time I filled my days with short jogs and mostly-pointless errands just to fill up the time, while Casey went to several different schools in order to prepare for his new job on the minesweeper, USS Patriot MCM7. He says he learned mostly information that won't make any sense to me and/or isn't allowed to tell me, so we'll just say he learned "a lot". He also met several of his future shipmates, including his Executive Officer, who arrived just a few months before us (the Executive Officer, or XO, is second only to the Captain of the ship, for the non-navy folks out there).

We were lucky during our time in San Diego to have a period where Casey didn't have any school for a few weeks and we had lots of adventures. We went to Las Vegas, Disneyland, Universal Studios, Sea World, Catalina Island, on hikes, and to a lot of movies. We tried to capitalize on what San Diego had to offer without spending every last dollar we had (thank goodness for tax-free groceries and discounted movie tickets from the MWR)! It's expensive to have fun in San Diego!

Despite my initial impressions, I didn't end up hating all of San Diego. We went to a lot of great restaurants, and met up with some friends for concerts on Coronado Island. And fine, I'll admit it, I did enjoy the mild temperatures and sunny days, but I think that's mostly due to the CRAZY heat/humidity here that makes me miss the cooler weather (the base put up the black flags yesterday, no outside activities allowed)! I still miss the misty, overcast, no-chance-for-a-sunburn weather of Seattle.

Anyways, even with all the fun we had in San Diego, living in a hotel was getting old fast. Although we were really blessed and grateful to stay in a place with a kitchen and space enough we weren't tripping over each other for months. When we finally got word that we had a real date for flying out (5 days before the flights), we were again initially excited and then immediately stressed (by we, I still mean "I"). Instead of booking my ticket from San Diego, the Navy's rules dictated that I needed to fly out of Seattle, because I was technically still supposed to be living there. It sounds complicated, and it is. Basically, because Casey was not "stationed" in San Diego, his family wasn't authorized to "move" there with him, so according to the Navy, I was supposed to be "living" in Seattle, even though they already came and packed up our apartment and shipped it to Japan. Needless to say, 5 days away from flying out and my tickets were from almost 1,300 miles away made me a little crazy, and in the mean time I still needed to pack up 3 months of suitcase/car living and somehow dispose of our vehicle. Thanks in absolutely no part to me, Casey worked out the flight situation, and our friend Jayne (an absolute God-send) let us park the car at her place until it could be shipped back to Casey's family. Jayne's help goes well beyond just the parking of the car, but again it's complicated and all I can say is thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou to a fellow Navy wife, who knows what it's like to have to do things on the fly. :-)

So 3 trips to the FedEx store, and 2 trips to the U-haul store later, our hotel-home was packed, taped and labeled for the trans-pacific flights. And now all we have to do is go on them....

(to be continued)