Welcome to the Army

Alright so I'm resurrecting my blog. My mom has asked me a couple of times about it, and now that we're out in the real world I'm sure most of you will want to know what's going on with us and this will be the easiest way. Let me just let that sink in for a moment. We're out in the real world! This is so weird to me. It doesn't really even feel like we're out in the real world yet. Of course, we're kind of in limbo right now so that's probably why and I'm sure it will feel more real as soon as real life actually starts, but whatever.

So as you all should know, Andrew and I just moved to Lawton, Oklahoma. Here's where it is, if you were wondering.

Now I know many of you are worried about us because of the tornadoes in Oklahoma, but there's no need to worry yet, the tornadoes weren't near us. I'm sure future tornadoes might be, but no need to worry now.

We left Utah yesterday around 8 am, and since we moved ourselves, we were driving a Uhaul and had our car on a trailer. We originally planned to drive through Albuquerque, but according to the GPS the shortest route went through Colorado so we decided to go that way instead. It was a gorgeous drive (at least through Colorado), but it ended up taking us forever because the speed limits ranged from 35 to 65 for most of the way, and you can't really drive that fast in a Uhaul pulling a car anyway. What we thought would be a 16ish hour drive ended up being a 20ish hour drive. It felt like it would never end. Fortunately it did end, and we got into our hotel around 530 am. As we were coming in, there were actually tons of guys leaving for PT.

Everyone who told us about what Lawton was like would tell us how ghetto it was, so I was expecting a shantytown or something. It is pretty ghetto, but I was expecting a lot worse. If given a choice, I wouldn't choose to live here, but I'm sure there are lots and lots of worse places to live.

We didn't know where we were going to live when we got here, so today we went apartment hunting. They have a housing office here on post, and the nice lady there recommended several places for us to check out. The offices of the first two we went and looked at were closed (perhaps it was a sign...they didn't look that great anyway), but the third place, called Summit Ridge, was open, and it looked like a really nice place. When the lady in the office (her name was Brianna) asked where we were from and Andrew said we just graduated from BYU she said that she and her husband had graduated from BYU as well. Her husband was even in ROTC and Andrew actually knew him. He was in his third year of ROTC when Andrew was in his first though, so he was a bit older. Small world huh? Anyway, the apartments there were all either 2 bedroom 1 bath or 2 bedroom 2 bath, and they had two townhome options (which means it has stairs, which I didn't know before she told us), and one flat. The townhomes were cheaper, and they were both really nice. We pretty much knew right away that this was the place, although we did have a couple more we were planning to look at. Brianna offered to give us the skinny on all the places we were looking at, and her advice was actually really helpful. She may have been a little biased, and she was of course most complimentary of Summit Ridge, but it really did seem like one of the nicest places we'd probably find for a decent price. Even though we pretty much knew we were gonna rent at Summit Ridge, we decided to go look at one more place anyway, but we just ended up going right back to Summit Ridge. So anyway, we have a place to live! We went with the 2 bedroom 1 bath cause it was a little bit cheaper, and I think we're going to like it. We move in tomorrow.

Well that's pretty much it for now. Tomorrow Andrew reports and on the 31st he starts his training. It's called BOLC (pronounced bullock), which stands for Basic Officer Leadership Course, in case you were wondering. Andrew's training ends in mid October, but we don't know where we're going after that. So yeah, that's all I can think of for now. There might be more, but I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night and I think I have a cold so my brain's not working too well. So that's all folks!