Kitchen after cleaning out six garbage bags worth of stuff!

Living room, after cleaning

Sunday scoping out all those dog beds piled on the chair.

 And a few minutes later, Sunday making herself at home on top of all those dog beds piled high on the chair!

Dog beds on the chair were great, but this King Sized bed with a window view is the best!

More NH pictures

 Sunday watching her domain from Sandy's deck

 She keeps going around to the back of the house and wondering why she can't get back in.  Richie must be making her do it.

More toys!!  Gotta kill it!

Finn listening to the ghost of Sandy teaching him the proper procedure for ripping the stuffed dog's head off.

Watching his domain in "Sandy Pose"

Life at the cabin is good.

 

 

All that domain-watching and squirrel chasing tires a puppy out!

Doug took the RV and the pups to NH to do some work on the cabin.  The pups are having a great time exploring in the woods and discovering all the old toys left behind by our original pack. 

Finn exploring the banks of the Ammonoosuc River in Littleton NH

Sunday the swimmer dog!

Sunday in her favorite "Sandy pose"

Woohooooo! (We have countless pictures of Richie and Magie woohooing down the driveway just like this!)

Doug is living in the RV there so he doesn't have to turn on the water in the cabin.  The RV might actually be bigger than the cabin??

The old wood pile

Jackpot!!!  A whole box of gently used toys!!

 

First snowfall!

This might not be Snowmaggedon by NH or Upstate NY standards, but this is the first snow we've seen in 2 years! The pups had fun running around in it with their snazzy orange hunting vests.  They've adapted well, considering that all they knew before was warm desert, sunshine, and lizards.

Finn is very busy.

How Finn spends his day.... back and forth, back and forth, along the fenceline, herding squirrels and deer and God knows what else out in the trees. He just doesn't stop. The damned dog is going to give himself an aneurysm.

Home is Where the Pack Is

Got our new house at Ft Leonard Wood today. It's in a nice neighborhood on post, surrounded by woods and grass. It reminds us of our house at Ft Lewis (without the moss growing on everything).  This one must have been built in the early 50s and has never been updated. It's so old, that all of the electrical outlets are still non-polarized, non-grounded 2-prongers!! Doug had to go through and install adapters all over the house before we could even plug in a light. But, it's on a quiet street with a huge fenced backyard which backs up to woods, in a super-safe neighborhood (MPs have driven by several times today) and it's only 5 minutes to Jens office.

The pups aren't sure what to make of all of this - they've got their own yard again and that yard has SQUIRRELS!!  They've been going nuts all afternoon, checking every tree several times for squirrels and herding the deer from inside the fence.  We're pretty sure we made them happy with this move.  Supposedly we'll get our furniture and stuff that's been in storage since March in about 3 weeks. Until then, we have all the stuff from the RV in the house, making it feel like home. :)

Big night in Waynesville

Tonight, the local volunteer fire department took over our campground to do a controlled burn.  Big night for the small town department!  Must have been 5 engine trucks, and at least 20 pickups with various flashing lights and fire department decals. The entire campground is roughly the size of half of a football field, so it looked more impressive than it was. Gotta love small towns.

Our new "home" - Ft Leonard Wood

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.

Day 54: New Car, New Pub, New Beer Store (23 Sep 14)

Jen spent the morning pampering herself at a salon, getting a serious haircut (3 months of weed growth... ugh!) and highlights.  You know you're in the Bible Belt when an otherwise normal Aveda salon is named "Salon Truth" and there are framed scripture passages all over the walls (but the stylists were all cackling about how shitfaced they all got last weekend, so I guess they're a looser kind of religious fanatic in these parts). Weird.  Jen also took advantage of a real shopping mall with a Macy's to stock up on skin stuff and cosmetics. Ha, you laugh, but have you seen where we've been living the past several years? Macy's is a treat!!

We also discovered a great British Gastropub, with lots and lots of local beers on tap and locally sourced food. We discovered two great new breweries via this place - one from St Louis and the other from right here in Springfield (they just don't have a tasting room... yet).  Our server was kind enough to tell us about a local beer/wine specialty store just up the street (after we had to explain to her what a growler was - apparently that concept is completely foreign around here).  Gotta hand it to her, though, she was right - it was one hell of a specialty store. Even had beers from Maine! Jen bought one of everything with pumpkin on the label (including a pumpkin-infused apple cider from Woodstock) and Doug got himself some IPAs. 

Then it was back to the Subaru dealer to pick up Jen's new car. She's in heaven.  Not sure how someone could get so excited about a station wagon, but she's acting like she just got a Mustang or something.  Of course, as soon as we got home, she opened the door to show Doug the inside and Finn jumped right in and got Paw prints everywhere.  Ah, what's a Subaru without paw prints anyway? 

Tomorrow, off to our new home at Ft Leonard Wood (a/k/a Fort Lost in the Woods)