After 8 weeks, graduation week was finally here! I was so excited! My Mom and I had a 5:30AM flight on Wednesday so we left the house at 3:30AM, so it was an early morning! We flew to Detroit and then got on a plane to San Antonio. We had great flights there, no problems at all! After picking up our rental car, we went and checked into our hotel. We stayed at the Best Western Ingram Park. After reading reviews and seeing the price of this hotel, I booked it right away. I have no regrets staying in this hotel and would recommend it to anyone attending graduation in the future! After checking in to our hotel and eating lunch we decided to go scope out the base. That was the first time I had ever been on a military base. It was cool! All the trainees were scattered around the base, so we kept looking to see if we could see Chad. No such luck. Since we got up so early that morning, I didn’t have any problems falling asleep that night even though I was so excited to see my husband the next morning! I think my body went to sleep but I’m not sure if my mind ever did.
Thursday morning was another early morning, but it was all worth it. I believe we left the hotel at 5:45AM, but had to turn around and go back since I left the banner at the hotel. Woops! Thankfully we scoped out the base the day before, so we knew exactly where we were going. I decided that I was going to go the 7AM visitor briefing while my Mom stood out by the road to save a spot for us for the Airman’s Run. I found the visitors briefing to be quite boring and not of use to me. It would be good to attend for someone who has not done their research but because of AF WingMoms, I knew everything that they had to say. By the time I got out of that, it was about 7:45AM and people were just starting to line up for the Airman’s run, there was still a ton of room. My Mom and I met up with some of the people that we had been talking to online for the past 8 weeks that were in our FLT group. So that was really cool! Promptly at 8AM, the Airmen’s run began. You could see them coming from a distance, it was the coolest thing. Basically during the Airmen’s run, they run past you and then they turn around down the road and come back and run past you again and that’s it. It’s the first time you see your Airman in 8 weeks though, so it’s amazing!
After the Ariman’s run, we had to go to the retreat pad and wait over an hour for the Coin Ceremony to begin. The weather was perfect, not too sunny and a nice breeze so it was really nice. After waiting and waiting, finally the Coin Ceremony began. It was a really cool experience. After they got their coins, they were dismissed. This was my favorite part, the “tap out”. The Airman have to stand at attention until someone comes and “taps them out”, which in my case was a giant hug! Most amazing thing ever! After that, he was free to go with us anywhere on base. We ate at Godfather’s pizza for lunch, which was really nice & relaxing. After that we drove around checking out the base. We stopped at a couple museums, the BX, and the commisary. It was a nice day! The worst part was having to drop him back off at the end of the day!
Next post: Graduation Parade!
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