PCS Stories - Move #1

With our impending move fast approaching, I have been reminiscing about some of our past moves. Each move has particular memories for me. Some are the moving process itself, some are the people or the places. Every PCS has it's own story. We are entering the "older-than-most-everyone-else-in-the-Air-Force" crowd, so some of the things I mention have long since passed and will probably be totally foreign to many. Here goes.....

Move #1 - Ames, IA to Sacramento, CA (Mather AFB)...aka A big wad of cash, some sandwiches, and a dancing airman.

Mather AFB was an early BRAC victim. It was a great base! Fabulous location for new lieutenants (and their families) - 2 hours from the Sierras, 2 hours from San Francisco. Gas was cheap and you had nothing but time and money. Alas, this is not the big memory for me.

The first memory was going to Offutt AFB (Omaha, NE) to get our travel advance! By travel advance, I mean PCS money! There was no government travel card back then - thank God! We drove 3 hours to pick up cold, hard cash....I think it was about $2000 worth! As poor, just-graduated college students, we were going to move cheap and save a bunch of that cash.

I think the AF gave us 5-7 days to get from IA to CA. We divided up the drive and figured out where we would spend each night. (Remember those little books that the hotel chains used to put out that listed every hotel by state. We had all the books and checked all the prices!) The first night, we officially spent at Nort's parents' house in Kansas City; 2nd night - Denver (probably a Comfort Inn); 3rd night - Grand Junction, CO (Motel 6 - Yes, Motel 6); 4th night - Salt Lake City, UT (some "nice" hotel in the city that probably cost $75/night - that was our "fancy" hotel night); 5th night - make it to Mather AFB, CA.

We were going to save even more money by making some sandwiches to eat along the way instead of restaurants all the time. While in KC, we made about 4 hoagie-length sandwiches that we Saran-wrapped and stuck in the cooler with some chips and sodas (or "pop" as we called it back then). I remember stopping at a rest area near Hays, KS to eat lunch. It was windy! After 2 days of eating sandwiches, we threw the rest out and ate some fast food from then on. Oh, the other good travel story was the day we drove from Denver to Grand Junction. It was June. When we left KS it was pretty warm. Not quite that warm at the Continental Divide! We were in shorts and there was snow on the ground and it was freezing up there! We took some quick pictures and moved on.

(Ok, we're old, but this picture does pre-date our time there!)

The other memory from that move was our arrival at Mather. Driving up to an AF base gate back then was slightly intimidating. The gate guards all wore blues and white gloves. I remember one particular guard...I called him "Mr. Happy" because he was always smiling and waving and snapping a smart salute. Ah, those were the days...A smiling, happy gate guard. This guy used to have a routine, dare I call it a dance, for waving the cars through. He would wave his arms, spin around, blow his whistle, the whole nine yards. It was awesome!



Back then all of our belongings fit into that little part of the moving van that fits over the "5th wheel" area - I'm not a trucker, I don't know what it's officially called - but you know what I'm talking about. We took a minimal amount of stuff in our VW Golf - it had to make over the Rocky Mountains for crying out loud!!



So, some 18 months later, we'd load up the Golf again and head for AZ...but that's another blog post. Stay tuned.