Our First Duty Station

A week ago today, my husband told me where our first duty station would be. Never in a million years did I think I would even visit this place. It’s crazy to me.

It was about 6:00 on 4/23/2012 when I got a call from Chad. I was just sitting in bed on my laptop waiting to go to Fit Club. Chad answers the phone, Kinishiwa! I’m just like ok, I don’t know what that means, but Hi! :-) He then said something about how he found out where he’d be stationed. I of course was like WHERE?! Then he told me. I didn’t believe him, I did, but I didn’t. We made a deal that when it came down to telling me where we’d be living, he wouldn’t joke around about it. I just had never even thrown around this option for a duty station. Of course I talked about it several times with friends and family up to this moment, everyone joked we’d get stationed in Alaska (since we wanted somewhere warm) or somewhere really lame sounding like Kansas. But no one even guessed this one. Chad and I realized that we didn’t care where we ended up as long as we could be together. One of the only places I wouldn’t have been able to go with him to is Korea. His first tech school roommate and several others who had graduated from his tech school had orders for Korea. So for the week prior to finding out, we were freaking out. As soon as he told me, I was relieved the word Korea didn’t come out of his mouth, then I said to myself, Holy Crap! The first thing I did was google our future base. One of the first things I saw was a picture of cheerleaders. I’m a cheerleading coach, so that was a sign for me. A sign that this is where we were meant to go. After doing research, I’ve very excited to be going to….

Okinawa, Japan!

I haven’t heard one bad thing about it and it looks like it’s on a lot of people’s dream base sheet. So yay! It’s going to be a crazy lifestyle change. No matter where we would have got stationed, it would have been a crazy change but being on the other side of the world is even crazier to me.

I’m stressing out about the process that I have to go through to be able to go with Chad because it’s all so unclear. It’s like no one can give us a straight answer of this is what you need to do and by when. We’re trying to get me all cleared and process as soon as possible so I can fly on a plane to Japan with Chad. It’s possible that he’ll have to go and I have to stay behind until the military can get me all cleared to go!

Have you lived in Okinawa? I want to hear experiences, tips, facts, etc.! Tell me!