CONTRIBUTED BY MEREDITH NOVARIO
Merry Christmas Eve! The boys are asleep. The cookies and reindeer food are waiting to be sniffed out by Santa and his four-legged pals. The stockings are hung in the stairway with tacks. The dog wants to go for a walk and I’d like to take a shower. Life is good and filling. I wish you much goodness and fullness and maybe just a little less frosting than I ate today.
As merry and jolly as things may be, there is business to attend to. Pam has a great question. And I am going to throw my answer out there first only because it won’t be right and you’ll be forced to correct me and tsk-tsk me for not knowing and also because I can’t resist. It’s like a puzzle. I love puzzles but I am not good at puzzles.
Pam wants to know about all these gates she hears about. Specifically she wants to know what gates are around Kinser. Man, there ARE a lot of gates.
Kadena’s gate one. Or gate two. or gate three. Or four which is there but never open. Or five which is open only during certain hours and never the hours that it would be of any help to me. And then Foster’s Legion gate, commissary gate which is temporarily closed, spot gate and so on and so forth. Also Kinser’s housing gate and Pizza House gate. And on and on and on. No idea about Courtney or McT or Shields or Hansen.
Egads. There are many, many gates in our lives.
So, Pam. It sounds like you want to live off-base. True? False? The closest base to Kinser is Foster. The Foster gate that is closest to Kinser is the commissary gate because it’s on 58. That gate is closed until some future time but not forever. The next base headed north on 58 is Camp Lester with two gates. Then north of that is Kadena’s gate one. We live north of gate one and my husband worked on Kinser. Although it’s only 7 miles on 58, it took him about 40 plus minutes to commute there. He didn’t mind the commute because he listened to his podcasts. I minded the commute because that was 80 extra minutes that we could have been together.
Also, there is a by-pass between Foster’s commissary gate and Kinser where there’s a lot of housing. I dig that area for the look and convenience but have no idea what housing options are there. Plus that’s right by Ginowan Seaside Park which is a great wide open space. AND near Uniqlo where clothes are cheap and funky.
WAIT! One more question from Pam.
Is there a website for school zones? I would much prefer my kids to start school at a more human hour as opposed to the subhuman hour of school starting at 7am (Will I have to wake them up at barely the crack of dawn to get the bus!?)
And there you have it.
Get some rest.
Be merry.
Help Pam.