Cross Country Road Trip// Drive from Rhode Island to San Diego

 California or Bust!

PCS'ing (Permanent Change of Station): an adventure paid for by the navy!
After graduating OCS you are given orders assigning you to your first command.
On my preference list of where I'd like to be stationed, we put:
1. Virginia (close to Kim's family/friends)
2. California (heard it was a really good base, and it's warm!)
3. Florida (Kim loves Florida)
4. Washington (close to my parents)

To our tremendous surprise I was assigned to a ship in Hawaii!! [Another guy getting orders at the same time actually put Hawaii as his first choice, and he got Washington ... so yea, preference lists are just for fun - ha!] My orders were a little convoluted and said I had to make an I-stop (intermediate stop) in San Diego for a school. Thankfully the navy will pay for your travel costs to relocate to the new duty station. This meant a paid trip to both Hawaii and San Diego, starting in Newport. I say "all expense paid" because the navy gives you a travel stipend depending on how far you are traveling and if you travel by car or plane. They also give you "travel days" which is basically free leave to use between PCS stations. So in my case I was allowed 9 days of travel by car or 1 day by plane to San Diego. Some of you may just want to buy the plane ticket and get it over with, not me! A 9 day road trip across the country, heck yes!

According to the info I found online to travel by car you get paid $0.19 per mile as well as $123 for meals (plus $92.25 per dependent over 12 and $61.50 for dependents under 12). Once you arrive at your final destination you will fill out a travel claim with help from your admin department. So keep all toll fees and anything you think you might be able to get reimbursed on, better to try and ask for more reimbursements then you will get then not ask for what you deserve. I am not sure exactly how much I got paid for the trip but it was a nice chunk of change. Keep in mind though most of the time it takes a while to complete the travel claim so make sure you have enough money on hand to do without it at first.  I will link the website for the rates I found at the bottom of the page for your continence.

Anyways, after we got my orders, I went down to check out with the admin department of OCS and then called ahead to the Basic Division Officer Course to let them know I was going to take a few extra days of leave during travel. They were fine with it since my orders allowed me to check in anytime in December.

And with the heavy eastern winds of Newport at our backs, we drove west! It was about time too, as 2 months of student-pool during the frigid winter in Newport gets quite tiresome. The first stop on our epic Road trip was Philadelphia to spend Thanksgiving with Kim's parents. Perfect timing as we left 2 days before Thanksgiving. We had a good time catching up with her family and enjoying some of their holiday traditions but we had to continue west. Our next stop was at our little apartment in Ohio. I had really only spent a couple months here before I went to OCS so it was a little strange coming back to it, still almost exactly how I left it. We packed the car with anything we thought we could take on a plane with us to Hawaii at a later date. Things like a skillet, silverware, a pot, and other odds and ends we made due with. We only spent the night in our apartment before I paid 6 months of rent and locked the door to continue our journey. Now some of you are probably wondering why I didn't just pack up the apartment before heading to San Diego. Well we did try, we looked desperately to see if we could do it in a week but the soonest we could get the movers to come was 2 weeks out, so decided that we would fly back at a later date to pack everything up to send to Hawaii. It worked out perfectly because because we still had an apartment in Ohio and were still receiving BAH which was far more than the rent on our apartment. Also we found out later that the moving company would hold our stuff in Hawaii for 3 months at no cost, so it worked out that I flew out before my 2 month class to have it shipped.


Back to the adventure. The first night we didn't really have a planned stop picked so we just drove as long as we could bare and stopped in some Motel 8 on the way. Not the most luxurious of locations but a bed was all we needed. The great American Plains came and dragged on endlessly but eventually we reached the promised land: Colorado! Having grown up in Colorado it was good to be back even though we came on apparently the coldest day in recent memory. It was negative 10 degrees with the sun shining. But since it was a dry cold it wasn't as bad as the cold wet wind of the east, well at least in my opinion. We spent 2 nights in Colorado catching up with old friends. I also accidentally forgot to tell my brother who was in the northern part of Colorado in school that I was in the state... oops. Sorry Austin! A friend of mine owns a motel in Colorado he was nice enough to save the best room for us. They also offered to give it to us for free, but I felt that if the navy was paying me specifically for this kind of thing that I should just pass the money along.

We were warned the night before we were scheduled to head over the mountains that a big storm was blowing into the mountains and it could give us some problems on the road. I didn't want to spend more leave then I had to waiting for a storm to blow through, winter storms are very common in the mountains so I figured we would just plow through it. That may not have been the wisest decision but I had grown up driving on ice and snow, in fact I got banned from my high school parking lot for doing donuts in the morning on the fresh ice... But that is a story for another time. Our goal for that day was to reach my grandparents in Utah, normally a 10 hour drive. But when the snow started to fall it slowed us quite a bit. By the time darkness fell we were on a road that didn't have stops for 120 miles, and we didn't see a single other car for 3 hours. Yea ... 3 hours on a major cross country freeway without a single car. The snow was coming down enough to cover the lines and the plows weren't running yet.  No cell service, no lines on the road, no radio stations, no cars. It wasn't looking good, but we stayed on the road and I kept the car at a safe speed of 25 the whole way and we eventually emerged from the mountains in a valley with a 2 gas stations and a few motels that had numbers in their names. We chose the motel with the largest number on its sign (motel 8) and stayed the night after telling my grandma we would be coming the next day.

The next morning the sun emerged revealing beautiful snow capped mountains cradling the road to Utah. The roads were being plowed as we drove down the roads making for a much easier drive. We arrived to the relieved hugs of a grandma who worried we would roll off the road in the snow. Having arrived pretty early in the day we had time to go to Zion National Park with them and see such a beautiful national park that I had only ever seen in the hot Utah summer, now under the largest snow pack in 100 years.

We spent the night in my grandparents guest bedroom which was weird in the fact that every stay up to this point my brothers and  I had always had the floor in the little house's living room while my parents would stay in the guest bedroom. This was the first time Kim and I had visited as a married couple and had earned the guest bedroom.

The final stretch to California was enjoyable just for the beauty of the mountains in the west, but as we approached San Diego the width of the roads steadily increased to a point of having 7 lanes on each side... ridiculous!  Our long journey ends with us checking in for a 7 month stay at the Navy Lodge in the always sunny San Diego.

3,132 miles. Driving through 2 snowstorms in the mountains. 5 days in the car. 
Successful Cross-Country Road Trip. 



Per Diem Page linked here.