Sorry for the long delay since my last post.  In June, we left San Antonio and headed on a fabulous trip across the American Southwest on our way to Hawaii.  As excited as we were to head to Paradise with the Army for a few years this move was incredibly stressful and I just feel like we are starting to get settled in our new home.  For those of you who get orders here in the next year I hope to help you make the transition a little more smoothly than ours.  I’m going to separate things out in categories to make it a little easier to find.

Pets

First off prepare ahead as best you can and be ready for unexpected surprises.  If you are planning upon bringing pets check out the regulations on the Hawaii government’s quarantine page here.  We decided with our decision to travel the southwest in the middle of summer to go ahead and put our two dogs in the Quarantine for 4 months but they have several options including immediate pickup from the airport so make sure you read the regulations early and thoroughly because some of the requirements have to be performed at least 4 months out.  Also start researching airline requirements as depending on the time of year you are PCSing there are restrictions for flying your pet in the cargo hold based on the temperature.  Ours flew on American Airlines.  The staff was super to work with and they offer a great military discount. I had to have them at the airport at 4 am though to get out of San Antonio and through Phoenix before temperatures started rising in May.  If you choose the quarantine route, when you arrive you can visit during scheduled times and the facility will issue you a pass so that you do not need to check in at the desk every time.  I can’t remember if you had to be paid in full to get the pass or not.

Professional Licensing

Next, if you are a spouse who needs a professional license start your application as early as you can.  All professional licensing seems to be processed through the same office including physicians, nurses, real estate, engineers, mechanics…  you get the picture.  Therefore, it is a slow process. I did not receive my medical license until we had been here 6 weeks already and when you depend on your spouses’ income and have an expensive move it’s stressful.  So go to the Department of Professional and Vocational Licensing and see if you need a license early and get your application done.  Then follow up frequently to check the status. Be forewarned I rarely called that I was not on hold 30-60 minutes waiting to speak to someone in the office.

Household Goods

The military allows you to place part of your household goods in non-temporary storage when going OCONUS (Outside the Continental United States).  The homes in Hawaii are not very big, though depending on where you are in base housing they can be decent sized. We have a family of seven and were shown 4 and 5 bedroom houses ranging from 1400 sq feet to 2300 sq feet with a mix of older and newer housing. (More on housing later). We mainly placed furniture in Non-temporary storage but the important thing to remember is to make sure you separate it out from what you plan on taking and as usual take good pictures or video of everything.  I’ve had friends whose goods were lost and the company wanted proof of what they had.  Also, make sure they load everything.  We arrived in Hawaii only to find that one of our dining room table leaves made the trip here with us.  Now it;’s just taking up valuable closet space.

When they move your household goods overseas instead of loading one big truck they load multiple small containers.  On the other side, we found more crushed boxes than our normal moves.  I’m not sure if this was due to the way they were packed or the fact they had to undergo loading, unloading and transit through the Pacific Ocean on a cargo ship. If you do not have an address for delivery when they arrive your goods go into storage and then it can take a month to get them delivered.  Our household goods were loaded in San Antonio on June 15th.  We arrived on Island on July 5th.  Our goods arrived later in the month and we were told they could deliver on August 8th.  However, we didn’t have an address yet as we hadn’t been assigned a house and our goods were put in storage.  A few days later when we got an address it was too late.  Our household goods were delivered August 23rd even though we moved into our house on July 31st.  Thankfully, when living on base you have the option of Aloha furniture which gives you a bed, dresser and night stand for each person and table, chairs and couch for the common areas.   Back to some important random mover info, we were told we have 75 days to file a claim versus the 90 days last time; they did not offer to unpack but did state that when we were done unpacking they would return to pick up the boxes and packing material.  Another quick word on this- it can take several weeks for them to schedule to the pick up. We have not filed our claim yet but friends were asked to turn in broken items which in some cases were upsetting to them as even though they wanted reparation for the damage the item held sentimental value that made it worth keeping for them.

Travel

We always take advantage of PCS time for great vacations.  My husband has a serious travel problem.  He works to travel and is always planning our next vacation.  When traveling prior to an OCONUS move there are a few important things to remember.  You need to take enough clothing to make it through until your household goods arrive.  However, you probably don’t need everything every night in a hotel.  We have five children and our nanny moved with us.  We were allowed four bags per person excluding our nanny as she is not a dependent and that did not count children’s necessities such as car seats and strollers.  We had 33 items between the 8 of us.  Thankfully we had three cars to load them in and upon arrival in Hawaii most units have a party that greets you at the airport and a van to transfer your luggage to the hotel.  This was a lifesaver for us.  During the trip, we packed a bag for the children and a bag for us to make getting in and out of the hotels each night easier.  The rest of the luggage stayed in the car.  Since we were staying in a different hotel almost every night we didn’t want to be unloading 33 items and reloading each day and wasting our sightseeing time. For the kids bags, I used IKEA’s collapsible drawer storage bins (the longer narrow bins) and packed an outfit for each child in 1 bin and stacked the bins into our Eddie Bauer rolling duffle suitcases.  I was able to stack two rows of 4 in the smaller duffle and 2 rows of 6 in the larger one.  I took in 1 bag until those days worth of clothes had been used and then switched to the other bag.  Thankfully, by the time I was into a second bag we would stay in a hotel with laundryfacilitiess and be able to repack the clean clothes.  When the clothes were out of the container it just unzipped and folded flat and was placed back in the bag.  We kept a dirty clothes bag the we put clothes in at the end of the day and we dressed kids in the next days clothes after their baths each night so that we didn’t have to take PJ’s.  In the extra large bag we brought some of the kids toys for when we would be staying in a hotel on island.

My husband researched national parks and local sites and mapped out our trip.   We were able to use credit card points for a lot of our hotels which really helped to offset the cost of the trip as we had a lot of other out of pocket moving expenses with moving OCONUS like shipping the dogs, quarantine and shipping our cars. We didn’t drive more than 4 hours usually which gave us plenty of time to see much of the sites.  As we visited the parks we had the kids participate in the Junior Ranger program.  We bought each of them their own junior ranger vest, hat and compass and at each stop they picked up the educational pamphlet which usually included basically a scavenger hunt of the museum or park and after it was completed they brought it back to the rangers, said their pledge and earned another badge specific to each park. It was fantastic and the kids loved earning their badges. They are still putting on their vests and pretending to be Junior Rangers at home.  I recommend picking up the worksheet first thing and trying to get to the park early.  Our first park we didn’t pick it up until the end and then we couldn’t remember some of the answers and didn’t have time to walk all the way back through and other times we arrived at the park close to closing time and the Rangers were not willing to wait for us to finish. If you are interested in learning more about our travels with five kids under 7 then watch for the launch of our new travel blog “Traveling Chaos” sometime in the next few months. It will feature some of the great sites we have visited as well as tips for traveling with small children.

Cars

It is cheaper to ship your cars from the closest coast (usually) and they will likely get to your destination more quickly as well; so we drove all three of ours from San Antonio to L.A. and dropped them off at the loading lots ourselves.  We used Pascha for two of our vehicles (our nanny moved with us) and the government shipped the other.  If we had it to do over again we would have personally shipped our bigger vehicle and sent our mustang with the government because it took a lot longer to get that vehicle making transportation around the island with five kids a little more difficult for several weeks and there really wasn’t a difference in cost for shipping.

Housing

You cannot be placed on the housing list until you arrive so depending on your family size be prepared.  We needed a 5 bedroom due to our large family size.  We were able to stay at the Hale Koa with TLA.  They do not accept pets and so friends of ours stayed at the Inn on Schofield Barracks.  There are several other hotels that qualify for TLA but if you have a large family reserve your room early because during PCS season they fill up fast.

In regards to housing lists – if you are Army you can only be on the North or South list but not both at the same time.  We initially started on the South list for Fort Shafter but after 2 weeks of no movement and TLA ending at 30 days we moved to the North list for Schofield Barracks.  You can also make appointments and get on the lists for the other service branches but understand that you only qualify for up to 30 days TLA and you must have an offer letter to get all of it.  Also, you are a high priority on your service branch list. So for example, we were priority 2 on the Army list but priority 3 or below for the other service branches.  In addition, if you need a larger home understand that the number of units depends on the base and your priority depends on your orders not your arrival date so for Fort Shafter we were number 9 out of 14 that they knew would need a 5 bedroom.  Only only 4 of the families above us had actually checked in with housing and of those below us we didn’t know if they would bump us further down when they checked in.  At least, this is how it was explained to us.

We looked at off post housing options.  Unfortunately, with the recent decrease in BAH and now a decrease in COLA with a family our size that would have been difficult. A 5 bedroom in Ewa Beach, of comparable size to our current on base house, for example was $4,000/month not including utilities which are quite expensive here even with most houses having solar panels.  Trying to get closer into town wasn’t even really an option.  For smaller families depending on where you live it certainly could be.  Just make sure you ask what the average utilities are for the house as you need to factor that into your monthly expenses.  Also, rentals go very quickly here, particularly decent ones so be ready to make a quick decision.

Aloha Hawaii!

Even with the stress and unexpected surprises that occurred for us with this move we are happy to be here!  The weather is beautiful, beaches amazing and there are lots of great activities for the kids.  Living here is not the same as visiting as a tourist but we plan to enjoy our time to the fullest.  We were happy to find friends already here or PCSing at the same time as us and now that we are settling in look forward to exploring the island as well as branching out to see some of the other great islands near us. If you are interested in our adventure stay tuned for more posts including great information about our time at the Hale Koa in Waikiki, Pirate Cruise Adventure and loads of pictures of Paradise as I’m finally able to download all of my memory cards onto my computer for editing and am planning to start back offering Stylized Children’s Photography Sessions.  Feel free to subscribe for updates and if you are looking to learn more about traveling with young kids and Wordschooling then look for our new Blog “Traveling Chaos” which should be up and running in the next few months!