First Post

Well I’ve been in Okinawa for two weeks now and I’m anxiously awaiting the arrival of my family. This leads me to the first piece of advice for anyone who’s coming to Okinawa: Have your family travel with you! You may be thinking, “Duh”! You see, we thought we were being smart by having my wife and children stay at my previous duty station to let the kids finish up school there (I arrived in mid February), and in the mean time I would be here getting our base house set up. We figured it was a perfect plan. I would have our base house and all of our furniture set up waiting for them to simply walk in and have no stress of getting the house set up. Well we didn’t do our homework. Imagine my surprise when the housing office told me that I could not get a house unless my dependants were within 30 days of arrival. What??!! This is the point where our perfect plan starts to go down like the Titanic.

Little did I know how my pay would be affected as well. Although my orders clearly say “Accompanied”, I don’t get full COLA & OHA until my dependants are here. Everything drops to single rate. This is another example of me not doing my homework. Now I think, “I’m off to a rough start…..time to scramble and see if I can change my family’s itinerary”.

My wife comes to the rescue and changes here itinerary, so now they will be here in a couple of weeks. Sorry kids, you’re going to have to change schools in the middle of the year.

The lesson here is to do your homework before you create the “perfect plan”. After a rough start, I have secured housing and counting the days (12) until my family joins me. Loving the island so far though.