Old Friends

One of my favorite things about life as a military family is that we get to meet all sorts of people from all over the country, folks we'd ordinarily never meet. It's always interesting to hear their backgrounds because the differences between us are usually far fewer than the similarities. One of the things I really hate about life as a military family is that you only share a limited amount of time with the friends you meet, and then everyone is off somewhere else beginning a new adventure. Luckily, you sometimes get the opportunity to bump into those old friends again on a personal basis and not just via email. We got that opportunity last night.

Our friends Brandon Jaroch and Garrett Condon are in town for a conference at Lackland AFB, which is just across town (you may remember that Tyler was born there). We were able to coordinate our schedules and meet up with them for dinner.

We met Brandon when we were stationed at Holloman AFB in New Mexico. We often refer to those as the "glory days" because Danny and I were newly married and we had a pack of friends that we saw on a very regular basis. We were all either newlyweds or still single, but there were no children involved so we could take off and explore the area anytime we wanted to. We had lots of late nights with those friends and made tons of memories that we will always cherish. Brandon was among that group. He started out one of the single guys, but he wound up meeting his sweet wife, Carla, while we were there. He is now stationed in Alaska but will soon be heading to Las Vegas (must be tough...). Since we hadn't seen him in several years, it was awesome to catch up and to learn about life in the arctic!!

Garrett was one of our buddies from Barksdale in Louisiana, so we'd seen him more recently. He's a New Yorker, and we always enjoyed showing him a good time, Southern style. One day, we took Garrett to a gun show, then to Waffle House, and finally to Wal-Mart. I think he was traumatized. But, we are all about the hospitality, and we sure didn't want him to miss a minute of all the fun there is to be had in the South!

It was so much fun to see these guys! I hope we'll get to cross paths with them and others again very soon!