Goldsteins in Alabama!!

We have arrived to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. This will be our home for the next six weeks. We still have our house at Vance, awaiting our return, but we are here while Yoni goes through ASBC (Aerospace Basic Course).

The drive here went rather smoothly. We went to Dallas on Friday and stayed with the Deganis up north for a lovely Shabbat. One of the boys in the Rich family had his Bar Mitzvah, so we walked to their shul and joined in the simcha!

Saturday night we hit the road! We crossed the rest of Texas on I-20 and called it a night in Bossier City, a few dozen miles into Louisiana. We're definitely seeing a lot of this country...

On Sunday it was only about 7 1/2 hours more across Mississippi and into Montgomery, Alabama.

The base is big and really nice! They have just about everything here... there's a riding club, golf course, paintball, etc. And we've only just begun to explore...

I've also discovered their beautiful library, as it's a good place to sit and work on Math homework.. This Air Force Base is actually the location of Air University (the university for the Air Force), so there is an aire of education.

Yoni is doing all sorts of fun stuff. He reports usually by 0730 and is home by 1630, and during that time he does a lot of classroom learning, leadership training, and physical training. Next week he'll do Combined Ops, which combines him with students from the Senior NCO Academy (Senior and Chief Master Sergeants) and a bunch of captains here on TDY. This week he's performed his first PT test of our stay here, and passed easily.

His academics are somewhat challenging, and there is a great amount of extra projects that Yoni's flight has taken on and his day is always filled with stuff to do.

We really like it here. We were placed in a unique flight of mostly married couples with children in tow, so "Thanks!" to the Air Force for being considerate and making it easy for us to mix it up with the young families. Our neighbors are very sweet people and we look forward to becoming close with them. There is a spouse club here, too, and we have events planned every day. As wives of the LTs, we can also join our husbands and participate in certain activities and lectures.

This weekend Yoni has received special permission to leave an hour and a half early, so that we have time to drive to Birmingham for Shabbat. We have families to stay with and eat with up there. Via phone, it seems like an open, welcoming community. By the end of our career, we hope to spend Shabbat with every Jewish community in the United States!!

Some fun pictures:

Our room is a little short on dresser space, so Yoni converted one of the kitchen cabinets into his dresser :)











Last night, Yoni's whole flight and the families had a bbq in the courtyard in front of our dorm building. Yoni played some guitar and we all hung out for a few hours.