8573 miles, 17 states, and 55 days later, we arrived at our new "home", Ft Leonard Wood, on Wednesday. We've been spending the past few days exploring the area and learning our way around (with one more long - 90 miles each way - trip back to Springfield to pick up the car title).
Ft Leonard Wood is the home to the "Manuever Support Center of Excellence" which means that all the military schooling for three Army branches comes through here - Military Police, Engineers, and Chemical. So, just like Jen's last assignment at the Military Intelligence schoolhouse, this is also a school-based installation. This is a much bigger post than Huachuca, however, both in volume of students (90,000 per year here) and in geographic size. The surrounding town, however, is so tiny and bare it's almost funny... there's a reason the Army refers to this place as "Ft Lost in the Woods"
We are settled in to the Town campground, which is about 5 miles to post. No frills here, but we've got the basics (water and sewer) and the pups have the whole place to themselves. They've had a good time running like crazy around all the unoccupied campsites, as there is only one other RV here. It's also situated along a small stream, so Sunday has been able to go swimming. Happy pups.
We spent the good part of Thursday looking at houses off post and we're just not even remotely impressed, so we escalated the fight to get housing on post. We had initially been told that since we didn't have kids, we'd be in a 2br/1ba, but after talking to some supervisors, they agreed to give us a regular 3br/2ba. We looked at a few on Friday and picked one with a huge fenced yard for the pups (of course). It's nothing fancy, but it's close to Jens office and the gym, and it's in a nice neighborhood. We can move in on Oct 1st (even though we won't have our furniture for at least a few weeks)
Jen visited her new office on Thursday, and it seems like it's going to be a good environment. It's a very busy office that does a lot of courts martials (criminal trials under the military judicial system), and it's been undermanned for the past year, so the work has been piling up. Looks like she'll hit the ground running and not let up until it's time to move again.
Doug has decided he's taking up fishing as a new hobby - there are tons of creeks and rivers and lakes here. Very few MTB trails, unfortunately, as everything seems to be centered around water activities (which makes sense considering the hot/humid weather that is common here.)
Yesterday, we took the pups to the nearby Mark Twain National Forest for a short hike. Didn't see a single human being, but we did see two snakes (one of which was a copperhead, which made Jen scream and run) and lots of squirrels. The trail we walked was supposedly open to MTBs as well, but most of it was unrideable in our opinion. Lots more exploring to do.
As far as the brewery situation (all the important stuff, you know?) there aren't any right here, but we did find a cool little pub right down the street from our campground that has 66 beers on tap (66 because they are on Historic Route 66) with probably 60 of those being decent beers. They have a punch card thing, where once you've bought every single one of the 66 beers on tap, you get your name on the wall, a t-shirt, and future discounts on beer. Doug has accepted the challenge, and is already 5 beers toward mission completion (they count my beers toward his total too, thankfully!). So, all in all, I think we'll survive the next 18-24 months here.
Here's a few pictures from the last few days. We probably won't be updating the blog as often, now that our mega-vacation is over, but we'll put pictures up when we get our house and explore new places here in the southern Midwest.
