How we ended up in Korea; Pt. 2

After determining there was nothing we could do about our orders to Korea, we now had to decide if Austin was going alone, or if we were going as a family. If you choose to go to Korea unaccompanied (without your family) it's only a 1 year tour. If you bring your family it's an automatic two years, and if you want, when you get to Korea, you can sign up for a third year and make a few extra bucks. At first, I was SURE that we were not all going. Austin had nothing good to say about his time in Korea. But I could not get over the idea of not seeing my husband for an entire year, by choice. And didn't even want to think about the kids not seeing him for a year. He's sort of a big deal to them! Decisions, decisions!

Since I knew we were NOT going to Hawaii, I talked to our friends in Hawaii to share the sad news. The conversation went MUCH different than I had anticipated. She was actually JEALOUS!! I was shocked. From what Austin told me of Korea, I thought, "who in their right mind would WANT to go to Korea!" After getting a different perspective, I started looking into it myself. There wasn't a lot of useful information out there, most of it was conflicting or several years old. I finally ran across a blog by another Army wife, stationed right where we were suppose to be going, who had JUST returned to the states. They had actually chose to stay for three years. From what I could tell by her pictures and what she had to say, it didn't look bad at all.

My jealous friend and I! Miss her!

 
When Austin was stationed at Camp Hovey in the 90's, soldiers didn't have the option of bringing their families. Families have been coming to Korea with their soldiers for awhile now. Also, Camp Hovey is much further north than Yongsan. He was surrounded by a small town and farm lands. And not the kind of small towns and farm lands we have in the mid-west. Yongsan is surrounded by one of the most populated cities in the world. It was obvious looking at the bigger picture, that life where we were suppose to be going wouldn't be as bad as he was imagining it would be. The decision was made, we were all going. That was of course IF we could get command sponsorship.

In order to bring your family to Korea and have all the same amenities accessible as far as Army life goes, you must be command sponsored. This just means, "basically," that your sponsor's (military members) chain of command says, "yes, you can bring your family, we have a place for them to live and room in our schools etc." After filling out all the proper paper work and getting all our physicals, we had to wait for SEVERAL weeks before hearing back. It was now mid August and we had less that 8 weeks before Austin HAD to be IN Korea. This meant 8 weeks, to get all of our diplomatic passports and our entire house packed up and shipped out. Of course we also decided that we needed to have a garage sale, considering that we could only take half our normal weight allowance. (The Army would only allow us to ship half the amount they normally would, due to housing being much smaller in Korea.) We also needed to sell at least one of our two vehicles. Let the fun begin!