In late July, after leaving Virginia and driving almost 2,800 miles by myself, I arrived in California. I think my friends and family used to be in disbelief when in 2022 I first started driving across the country alone to see them, but now my wild stunts have become almost expected.
My original plan had been to drive directly to the home of my nana in the San Francisco Bay Area. But when I’d looked at my route, I’d realized I would drive right by my mom’s in the Sierra Nevada Foothills on the way there. It made sense to stop at my mom’s to avoid arriving at my nana’s—about three hours farther away—at night. I got to my mom’s right around dinnertime, just as I’d planned.
After a peaceful evening and sleeping semi in-my-own-bed, I woke up early and went to the local cemetery to visit my friend’s grave, and then on to a hair appointment with a friend that’s done my hair since I was a teenager.
Normally, I would have wanted to stay longer; I don’t think I’ve ever visited my hometown for just one night. I didn’t even bring my things in from the car, or tell anyone I was there; I only had time to sleep before heading out again. Technically, I could have stayed another night. But with only three nights total in California, my goal was to get to my nana’s and spend two of them with her, since my compressed schedule required me to then make a 12-hour drive up to my dad’s in Washington state to drop off my car before flying on to Burma.
My uncle, who had lived in my nana’s house, had recently passed away after a short illness. He had been my mom’s only sibling. My nana wanted to paint his old room and needed my mom’s help with some other things around the house. So my mom and I headed the 160 miles to my nana’s in separate cars. Appropriately, the first thing we did was go out for a Mexican dinner.
During our visit, I wanted to spend time with my nana—sitting in the backyard or checking out her puzzle table—and we did those things. I feel incredibly fortunate, entering my late 40s, to still have a grandparent who is now in her late 90s. Still, my short stay was also marked by distractions from various problems and tasks related to my PCS.
For example, I was trying to spend an hour or so a day updating my address change chart. I was worried about mail or deliveries slipping through my USPS Change of Address order. But there were so many accounts to log into, it couldn’t be done all in one day. And it’s hard to focus on something like that in someone else’s kitchen where there isn’t a grounded outlet for your laptop, or more importantly, when it interrupts precious time together. It had also been hard to do every night in a motel on my cross-country leg, but I’d made a couple attempts.
Additionally, my request to the Department IT folks to transfer my work account between FSI and Post had unpredictably resulted in my mobile access to work email disappearing. This was a problem because I needed to be able to read and send email as I headed towards Post. I cursed my own request and wished I’d have waited until I got to Post instead of following the rules and trying to be organized. I’ve experienced this phenomenon of “no good deed” so many times it seems I’d know better by now.
When I logged into my work laptop to open a ticket though, I discovered other, more time-consuming access issues. “Oh yes,” the IT Help Desk told me, “this is a known issue. We’ve had about 2,000 calls already this week.” Seriously?! How much did work productivity decrease because of foreseeable and preventable problems!
Several hours and three long phone calls later, my tech problems were finally resolved. However, my mom and nana had already gone to Home Depot to buy their paint and returned. During any other normal visit, I would have been there.
It might not seem like a big deal—and maybe, in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t—but it’s still frustrating to me. It was also part of the reason I asked my parents not to visit and help during our packout; the chaos of a PCS tends to swirl around and envelop everyone.
“Being there” is always a matter of degrees anyway. You can be present and totally detached, or distracted and busy yet still engaged. Still, I have to admit that, while I was grateful for any amount of time with my family on the way to Burma, I also resented the toll my own exhaustion and unexpected irritants took on what I’d hoped would be a more peaceful, focused visit.
At least on my second and last night at my nana’s, we all went out to dinner with my cousin, his wife, and their son, who recently started college. We didn’t take any pictures, which looking back seems like a major oversight. But in those hours that we were together, enjoying a delicious steakhouse meal and reveling in each other’s conversation and company, that was all that mattered. And it was wonderful.
I got on the road the following morning and made the 719 mile drive to my dad’s, arriving shortly before 9pm. Because his town sits above the 46th parallel, the summer nights are long and sunset arrives generously late, around 8:45pm. I found the drive through Northern California, Oregon, and Washington tranquil and rejuvenating.
I would have three nights at my dad’s before the long flights to Burma began, and we tried to make the most of it.
But even the calming waters of the Elochoman River in my dad’s backyard could not entirely inoculate me from PCS stress. Between our short nature walks and visits to local eateries, I was running to the post office to grab boxes for the things that wouldn’t fit in my suitcases, washing and rearranging my packed items to fit within airline weight and size requirements, and spending hours on the phone with the airlines.
The history of our PCS plane tickets is complicated, but the short version is that in order to make it to Rangoon with our cat, we needed help from the embassy travel agents at Post. The DC travel agents the Department contracts with for officer flight arrangements were not able to give us options that met the complex conditions we had to work with.
Some of our variables were:
– We needed to depart the United States on a U.S.-flagged carrier, and
-We needed pet-friendly airlines throughout that would allow an in-cabin pet, and
– We needed a routing that wouldn’t leave us on an overnight layover in Thailand or South Korea where we didn’t have the paperwork or permits to “import” our cat, and
– We needed to hit the window of arriving in Burma on the limited days there are flights into Burma and
-Our flight couldn’t be late or arrive past a certain time because there is a military curfew and neither us nor our embassy expediters could be on the streets! (And yes, that is the short version.)
It felt like trying to land a giant helicopter on a tiny narrow beam.
My original idea that V and our cat would come to Portland and spend a couple days with my dad and I was not to be, for a combination of the reasons above.
V’s official routing started in Dulles, and went to Atlanta, Seoul, and Rangoon. My official routing started with me joining him in Atlanta, because evidently the government did not care that I was saving it money by traveling across the United States to store my car privately instead of storing it at government expense, and it was my problem to get myself either back to my duty station in Washington or to Atlanta at my own expense.
So what I did was buy myself a first-class ticket from Portland to Atlanta on the same airline we were flying the Atlanta-Seoul route, and then call the airline to stitch my two itineraries together. I also sought to confirm I would be able to check my bags all the way through to my final destination; my first-class ticket had the most generous baggage allowance at two 70 lbs checked pieces each. I was hoping not to have to retrieve and recheck my bags in Atlanta or Seoul.
I didn’t care about overweight bag fees, but I cared significantly about not getting surprised by needing to go through Customs and Immigration in Seoul. Again, our cat did not have permission to enter South Korea and V and I did not want to separate on the short international layover.
In addition, one of the airlines we were traveling on wouldn’t allow me to pick seats in the app because there was a minor discrepancy between the way my name appeared in my airline account, and the way it appeared on my embassy-booked tickets. So that was a separate call of almost an hour, during a period where I really didn’t have a lot of hours to give away. I only cared because it appeared V had already been assigned to a seat “approved for in-cabin pet travel” and I wanted to sit with him.
All of this would have been plenty to worry about, but on my last full day with my dad, I made what was in retrospect the colossal mistake of trying to port our U.S. cell phone numbers from AT&T to Google Fi. My intentions were good, and the move came highly recommended by colleagues who have successfully kept their U.S. numbers active overseas at minimal cost. The access is especially useful for things like multi-factor authentication to log in to U.S. accounts.
From about 7am to 9am I did research and effected the port. From 9am to 11am I tried to resolve the various technical problems that arose by calling and chatting with Google Fi tech support.
First tech support said I’d tried to download the Google Fi eSIM without removing my physical AT&T SIM from my phone first. OK, done. Retried, failed.
Then they said my Google Fi eSIM installation failed because I hadn’t first performed an iPhone software update. OK, waited another half hour for that and done. Retried, failed.
I was on the phone until about 1pm trying different workarounds until my nerves were shot.
So I ate a sandwich with my dad and then spent two hours in his driveway washing and detailing my car, waiting for my Google Fi service to activate. It didn’t, so I drove five minutes into town thinking the problem might simply be that I didn’t have reception at my dad’s.
But when I tried to make a call and heard the error: “The phone you are using cannot make outgoing calls; please contact your carrier,” I knew something was wrong.
I spent about an hour longer on the phone from my dad’s landline with Google Fi until they finally informed me my iPhone was “too old” to support eSIM. Their proposed fix: I would need to drive to a Google store — in my case, hours away — and pick up a physical SIM. I had told them repeatedly that I was moving out of the country the following day and needed this account opening to be expeditious.
I was absolutely done with Google Fi, so I then spent a couple hours on the phone with AT&T to port my number back. Irritatingly, I had to make one more lengthy call back to Google Fi because I had failed to get the port-out and account numbers from their techs when I decided to cancel my service. It’s too bad I was on hold with AT&T for 45 minutes before realizing that.
There’s more, but it doesn’t matter. I cannot explain the despair and upset this stupid exercise brought me during a time when I would have much rather been hiking or watching TV with my dad, who I hadn’t seen in several months, and who I probably wouldn’t see more than once or twice in the following year. I suppose I could have handled this task earlier; however, all the advice I’d seen was to do it at the last minute and at the airport, because you can’t do it once overseas, so I thought I was ahead of the game!
It was one of those moments where—I didn’t hate my job, exactly—but I hated and resented the toll that uprooting your family again and again takes on you personally. This time, those feelings were layered with guilt and anger, knowing that many of my colleagues had recently lost their jobs and might gladly trade their unemployment for my stressful PCS.
My dad, realizing the massive amount of pointless stress and irritation I’d gone through (only to arrive right back at where I’d started), ordered a pizza from our favorite local spot and went to pick it up. We ate it on his back patio, the river peaceful in the background and the white lights twinkling in the tree above.
Since my stepmom had died in fall 2023, my dad’s dog had also died in 2024, and then his cat earlier this year. Being there without the animals to take care of or play with really drove home how quiet it could be.
I saw later that for some reason, my Oura ring did not categorize that day as “Stressful,” which really surprised me. I felt more stress that day than any other since the third day of our packout. But I also felt a tenacity and absolute resolve to not only get the outcomes I wanted from my to-do list, but to also preserve my agency and peace to the maximum extent possible.
My dad had remarked that he probably would have given up on the Google Fi port after the first few hours, whereas I had worked on it for around 11 hours (minus the car-washing “break”). That’s the thing, though—when you’re about to PCS, you’re already out of time: to take breaks, to punt tasks to a later date, or to ditch your to-do list for a massage or night out. The only time you have left is ticking quickly away.
And that’s why as soon as my AT&T service was restored, I tried to immediately just let it all go. I didn’t want the PCS beast to get my goat by stealing one more moment.
This is the way you take control back, and tell yourself, It’s my choice to go overseas. It’s going to be great. I will endure the death-by-one-thousand-cuts of stupid things, and I will prevail. I can handle any challenge that comes my way. Today, I will focus on what matters most. I felt the anger, stress, and frustration drain out of me, and all that existed was our plates of pizza and bottles of beer on the table before us, and our conversation as the night sky approached.
Collecting Postcards 