After we got back from being home in Ohio for the holidays we kind of just willed our time away...as awful as that is. We really didn't care for living in Altus, especially when we knew that we were so close to living in WA! Altus is a small town in the middle of nowhere. It does have some options that people in the REALLY small towns of the area come there for (Walmart, McDonald's, hotels, etc...), but not that much. We used to think that Columbus, MS was a small town...then we lived in Altus. We missed MS so much while we were there! It really put into perspective how nice we had it, which is good for our mindset if we end up being lucky enough to go back there for Mitch to be an instructor.
We did try to have some fun while we were there, though!
One day it was really nice out except for the perpetually strong wind, so my friend Jayme and I convinced our husbands that flying kites was a good idea. We even bought them their own awesome kites from the Dollar Tree. :)
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| Mitch was always having a little trouble ;) |
Since Mitch had the Monday of MLK, Jr Day, we took advantage of the long weekend and went to visit our friends Trey and Christy in Little Rock, AR. It is about a seven hour drive from Altus, so not terrible. They are lucky enough to be moving to Germany next month for their next assignment, so we wanted to be able to see them again while we could! Plus, it was Trey's birthday weekend so it worked out really nicely. :)
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| Dex is an excellent co-pilot :) |
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| Brother love |
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| The birthday boy! |
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| A fun birthday performance for him :) |
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| Christy took this of us...guess all the fun wore us out :) |
The next weekend was a really nice weekend, especially for January. We had been going back and forth between 70's and freezing for so long! We decided to take a trip to Altus Lake, about 30 minutes north of us. It was a really pretty area, but would have been better if the lake wasn't so low from the drought. They have hiking trails, paved paths, and access to the lake there. We just explored a little bit of it all.
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| Zoom in for deer watching :) |
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| All they wanted to do was swim! |
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| That should be all water... :( |
Around mid February Mitch finally completed all of his simulation flights and was ready to have his first actual flight (he did have an observation one in the beginning but didn't do any flying) in the big C-17! He told me an approximate take-off time window, so the pups and I drove to base and parked near the flight line to watch for him. I took a lot of pictures of the planes that took off in that window and then we matched the timestamps up with when he told me he actually took off to be sure of which one was actually him. :)
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| Taxiing to the runway |
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| My sidekicks ;) |
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| Throwback to seeing Mitch fly for the first time in the T-6! So tiny! |
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During our time at Altus, I had a weekly tradition to meet some of my friends at the local coffee shop (I've posted about it before) downtown. The owners, Donald and Doris, are awesome people who made our time there so enjoyable! Kristina and I (and little Logan!) were the last lonely coffee-goers, but still always found a way to spend hours there every Thursday. I miss my weekly coffee with my beautiful ladies! Here are some pictures from our last time. :) :(
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| Kristina's cute daughter Logan :) |
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| I taught her sister about the camera, so I had to teach her, too! ;) |
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| Us with Doris before we left :) |
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| Goodbye, coffee shop! |
We wanted to have some fun on our last weekend there, so we did the only thing there is to do--went to base to go bowling. ;) That's honestly the only thing to do if you don't want to go to the bar in town, so bowling we went! We had a really good time hanging out with our friends that are going to be spread around the world after Altus. Sometimes being a part of the Air Force system can be really bittersweet.
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| Me and Sydney! She was crushing on Mitch all night ;) |
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| Cosmic :) |
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| Mitch was the champion :) |
Finally, it was time to leave! We packed up our place and hit the road! Here are some pictures of our Altus apartment. It was old and kind of nasty, but it served us well while we were there. Another move checked off the list. :)
Farewell, Altus! :)
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