family housing

Oh, Glorious Day! We took possession of quarters 292A bright and early this morning. No more living in hotel rooms!

Maybe you think you can imagine our relief, but – no offense – I seriously doubt it. Barb, Tim & I lived in what the Air Force calls “temporary lodging,” two rooms on RAF Mildenhall, for a week and a half, and we stayed one night in a pretty cheap motel in Washington, D.C. The whole family was stuck in a shabby little room in Anchorage for three nights, and then there was the Misawa Inn, a very nice place but a tiny bit cramped with a family of four, particularly after almost a month.

Phrases you might have used to describe our temperament up to this point could have been “stir crazy,” “cabin fever,” and “go away or I’ll kill you.” Our liberation came not a moment too soon.

Weird coincidences: 292A is just about right across the street from the quarters Barb lived in when she was stationed here in 1987. She and I paged through an album of some photos she took back then, and one of the photos, taken from her front porch on a sunny day, shows the buildings that used to stand where our quarters are now. She didn’t know anybody who lived over there, and can’t think of any reason she might have snapped a photo of the spot she was going to live in fifteen years later.

[11/21/14: I was so descriptive back then. What I called “our quarters” was a two-story quadriplex in the family housing area on the south side of the base, about a five-minute walk from the front gate. The building looked new; actually, what it looked like was a bomb-proof concrete bunker, which was not far from the truth. It was made to ride out earthquakes, and I can tell you that after the bigger temblors we had, the whole building used to sway back and forth like a ship at sea. The kitchen and living area was on the ground floor, and our bedrooms were on the upper floor. Until we moved in, we were living in a one-bedroom hotel suite: B and I slept in the bedroom, one of the boys slept on the sofa bed and the other boy slept on a roll-away cot that we set up in the hallway each night before bed. This got old after just a couple nights; we were in that little room for almost a month, so “stir crazy” doesn’t even come close to describing how we were feeling before they finally let us move into our quarters.]