Adventures in the Army
Thinking about Grover Beach yesterday made me think about all the places we’ve lived on this Great Army Adventure.
When we married in 1992, we were stationed at Ft. Bliss, TX. It was a huge change after living 22 years on the California coast. Phil was with the 3rd ACR (which has now moved to Ft. Carson). We had a little one-bedroom apartment overlooking a field. If you’re ever driving through El Paso and see the big, blue water tower, that’s pretty much where we lived.
After that was Ft. Huachuca (wah-CHU-cah), AZ, about an hour from Tucson. We upgraded to a 2 bedroom apartment. We didn’t pay extra to park in the carport. Arizona is a dry heat. If I prefer any kind of heat, it’s the dry kind. I still remember walking out of the mall in Tucson at 8 pm and it still being 80 degrees. Winter was cold, and being at a high elevation, we did get snow. It didn’t stay on the ground, though. The cultural highlight of our time in AZ was the balloon race. At the time, Sierra Vista was a sleepy little town with lots of wide open desert spaces. A balloon race was held one morning and we just sat in our living room drinking our coffee and watching the balloons fill the sky.
From Arizona, we went to Ft. Knox, KY. We asked to go to Germany, but I guess the German restaurants in the area made it close enough for government work. Ft Knox was fun. We lived in a 3 bedroom Army house. We had a backyard with a stream running through it. Well, not really a stream, but the cement of the drainage ditch stopped when it got to our yard, creating a stream when it rained. We found some baby birds waiting for their mama there once after a huge storm. We checked back later in the day and they were gone. I like to think that mama bird was just rebuilding her nest and returned for her young ‘uns that afternoon.
When it was time to leave Ft. Knox, the Army told us to go to Panama. Um, not so much. We asked for Germany, they sent us instead to Houston, TX. Phil was working with the Reserves there. We actually lived in Sugar Land. It was called Sugar Land because it started out as the company town of Imperial Sugar. That was another good assignment. We also had a pretty decent sized 4 bedroom house. We used to talk about all the upgrades we would do to that house if we’d owned it. Best of all, Boo was born while we were there.
That brings us up to 1999. I’ll stop here for now.