Norfolk is one of the largest Navy, or even military cities in the world.
There are 4 different naval installations in the area as well as some Army and Marine. Needless to say most sailors don't get around to every d'urn base in the area, and I am no exception to that rule. The USS PORTER (DDG 78) was home ported out of Norfolk Naval Air Station (NAS for short). NAS is the base where I spent most of my time while I was here in Norfolk. Upon my return my C-school was going to be located out at Dam Neck Annex. This base is so small, it rivals Bremerton base (Not counting the ship yard). IT IS SMALL! And even with the navigational advances that we have at our fingertips it still took us almost two hours to find the stupid thing. Once there it wasn't too difficult to get around but it sure is a far cry from our place. We lived in a cute little 2 bedroom house in Norfolk about 10 min from Norfolk NAS, and now its a cute little two bedroom thats 35 min plus traffic from Dam Neck out in Virginia Beach. I guess commuting was inevitable. I have managed to avoid it for a good many years. So school kicked off with a bang on the 11th of January. Its a tipically formatted binge and purge learning environment. Choke down a 12 chapter book in 1 week and regurgitate it for the test; choke, gag, repeat. The course is 7 weeks long so needless to say its going to be a bumpy ride.
Week 1 is CCNA at school and finalizing move details at home. Weeks 2 and 3 were more of the same. Finally during week 4 the move paperwork was submitted and waiting for approval, and class was still more of the same. Our weeks consisted of sorting stuff, attempting to find things to get rid of, going to kareoke at Cogan's on Wednesday and Thursday night Bowling!
It was an interesting couple of weeks when Norfolk received the biggest snow storm in 5 years! all this snow brought the entire Hampton Road's area to its knees.
With the whole area sliding on the ice and digging themselves out of drifts, our move dates were put on hold. This of course added to my stress level dramatically, but gave us more time to sort and prepare. That extra time flew by and before we knew it the snow was melted and we were struggling to get everything disconnected and organized for the movers to pick up. Even with that extra time to prepare we were still up until 1:30 in the morning. That late night made for a long day in class the next day for me, and a really long day of directing the chaos of packers and movers at home for Brad, but when it was all said and done, everything was packed and we were moved in to the spare bedroom at our friends house down the street. That was the start of our nomadic experiment that would run the course of 6 weeks!
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