Absolutely loving AZ

It's been a crazy week for us. My mom and I surprised Mark and left Dubuque at 8am on Monday (4/6) and got back to Enid around 7:30pm. When I knocked on Mark's hotel room door, he didn't answer at first. When he finally opened the door, he just stared at me for a few seconds before it sunk in. *grins* He graduated at 5pm on Tuesday, and we were on the road to AZ by 1pm on Wednesday. Mark went from having 7 flights and 2 sims left, to being IFF complete and graduated in 8 days, and that includes a weekend. CRAZY! I'm so proud of him. He handled that pressure really well, considering we completely packed up and moved out of our house in the middle of all that too. He never ceases to amaze me.

So the ride through Oklahoma is REALLY boring. Think Iowa or Nebraska boring, except worse...

Luckily Ollie was my co-pilot for part of the trip....

Until he got bored too and cashed out with Mark and Sadie... =)

Luckily I had the occasional windmill to look at.

Texas was just as boring as Oklahoma.

But Sadie kept us company too.

When we got to Tucumcari, NM, we were greeted with a rainbow. Actually, it was a double rainbow, but it was on the other side of the car so I could only get a picture of one of them.

The dogs were on my lap for 90% of the trip, but when I kicked them in the back, Ollie positioned himself here...

The west side of NM got much prettier.

We were SOOO excited to make it to Arizona! (I can't believe how huge I look.... Ew....)

So we are officially in our new house. We got here around 8pm on Thursday. All our goods were delivered on Friday morning and we've spent the past 3 days trying to get somewhat organized. I'd say we're about halfway done. We absolutely LOVE this house. It's about twice the size of our place in Enid, but we have so much junk we're not really having any problem filling the whole house. We went to the commissary (grocery store on base) for the first time on Saturday and it was pretty overwhelming. The produce section alone was at least half the size of the entire commissary at Vance. We have any type of restaurant you can imagine within a 5 mile radius of our house. There is a huge park with soccer fields and basketball and volleyball courts and a nice playground about 4 blocks from our house, and we LOVE our neighborhood. Most of our neighbors have 3-5 kids each, ranging from 6-12 years old. We've already met quite a few of our neighbors, and the neighbors right next door invited us to a barbecue at their place on Saturday night! They're having a bunch of neighbors over so we can meet them all. I'm really excited. I'm kind of sad we're only going to be here for a year, because so far, we absolutely love it here. (Of course it's been in the 60's-80's so far. When it's 110, I might not like it so much...)

Mark's mom is coming here on Wednesday and we're all super excited to show her around. My mom has been here helping us a TON since we got here and she drove our Jetta from OK to here, which was a huge help also. We wouldn't be half as far as we are with organizing this place without my mom's help. We're excited to spend some time with just our moms.

I'll post pictures of our house once we get everything organized. Basically we could be living in the garage of this house and it would have been better than our place in Enid. Right now, it feels like we're in paradise. I hope you all can come and visit!!!!

PS - Our cell phones don't work here. They work in Phoenix, but not in our neighborhood. We have to see if we can get out of our contract with AT&T and switch to Verizon, and I'll try to do that tomorrow. In the meantime, our home phone is 623-236-3168. We don't have long distance service here though, which is why we're not calling anyone. Hopefully we'll get it all figured out soon.