By Marguerite Cleveland

     When it comes to PCS moves one of the most challenging is a cross country move. It is a long trip and you may not see your household goods for a month or more. It makes packing a huge task because of the length us time.

     Before you begin make sure you have the names of pet friendly hotels and lodging, also check if you have any relatives along your route you might wish to visit or stay with. Also schedule services for your cars so that they are ready for the trip.

     The first thing you should do is look at the route. I plan for 350 miles a day which is what the military allows. You can travel more each day but for us traveling with a pet and children, 350 miles works out to a 7 or 8 hour trip which is a perfect length allowing time for stops. I use MapQuest and input the whole distance in. Then I begin to refine the trip by looking at what cities or attractions are along the route.  I then start blocking off 350 mile legs. With MapQuest you can have multiple stops, so I will input a location to see if it is within my 350 mile range.

     Once you have a rough idea of your trip now you must refine it. The next step is to find your lodging. Google is your friend here. I also read reviews and find Trip Advisor is usually pretty accurate. Finding lodging is very challenging if you have pets. I have found the Best Western chain is pretty consistent with allowing pets. Another must have for a hotel stay for my family is a pool. While my husband and I are tired all day from driving, the kids are usually a bundle of energy due to sleeping all day in the car. A pool is a way to diffuse all that energy.

    My memories of cross country trips as a military brat inspired my lifelong love of travel. Instead of just stopping for gas, look for fun attractions to visit along the way.  Some stops I will never forget are the Corn Palace or the Store with over 70,000 silver dollars displayed. There are plenty of kitschy stops just off most interstates around the country.  A great guide is www.RoadsideAmerica.com, you can put in your route and pushpins will pop up along your route and you can decide which ones to add. We stop every two hours when traveling and make everyone get out of the car.

    In addition to packing everything you will need for 30 days without your household goods, you will need to have refreshments. We pack a large cooler filled with bottled water and the snack box with non-melting treats. With the summer heat it is important to drive with plenty of water and stay hydrated. Monitor your pets and small children to make sure they are getting enough to drink. There are still some stretches of highway that have long distances between exits so you want to have supplies.

     I make an itinerary for each day of the trip with hotel addresses and phone numbers, the general plan for the day and directions. Each car gets a copy. Sometimes you can find yourself without cell phone coverage so it is important to have a plan.

     What do you do to prepare for a long PCS move?

Marguerite Cleveland is a freelance writer who specializes in human interest and travel stories. She is a military brat, a veteran and now a military spouse.  Her military experience is vast as the daughter of a Navy man who served as an enlisted sailor and then Naval Officer. She served as an enlisted soldier in the reserves and on active duty, then as an Army Officer. She currently serves as a military spouse. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two sons. Visit her website www.PeggyWhereShouldIGo.com

Ahhhh, spring! Bees are buzzing, flowers are blooming and I’m over here sweeping the floors. It’s spring cleaning time again.

This year, I’m searching for ways to cut to the chase and make my annual (okay, quarterly because kids) cleaning spree a little bit simpler. Plus, I’d love to find ways to make everything just a smidge more environmentally friendly.

Deep Clean Your House for Spring

To make your house sparkle, grab a few key supplies:

• white vinegar
• baking soda
• lemons
• Bon Ami cleanser
• Borax
• essential oils – lemon, lavender, citronella, etc.
• cloth dust rags

These are all products that are readily available in most grocery or big box stores. You can DIY your own dust rags from older t-shirts, cloth diapers or other soft clothes. We actually cut up diaper changing pad covers. The soft-yet-tough terry cloth scrubs off even the most stuck on of messes on the counters or walls. Yes, walls. Did I mention I’ve got kids?

Even with my sometimes messy kids underfoot, I actually use all of these cleaning techniques in my own house. And I keep on using them because they work!

Spring Clean Your Laundry Room

Start with your top-fill washing machine. Set it to the hottest and largest setting. Fill up your machine, then add a cup of white vinegar and 1/4 cup baking soda. Close the lid and let it agitate for 3-5 minutes. Then open the top again and let it sit for a few hours. When time’s up, dip a dust cloth into the water and wipe down all the exposed parts in the drum.

On a front load washer, add the vinegar and baking soda before you start the machine. Then let it go through a complete cycle on the hottest setting. When it’s done, use a dust cloth to wipe down the rubber seal around the door.

If you have counters in your laundry room, wipe them down with a mixture of vinegar, baking soda and your favorite essential oil. Use just a drop or two of the oil to cut the vinegar smell. Spray onto the counters and wipe with a dust cloth.

Cut Grime in Your Kitchen

I don’t know about you, but my kitchen sink stinks to high heaven after a few days of heavy dishwashing. All the food and bits of stuff gets stuck down in there and just plain smells.

When it gets really yucky, I peel a lemon. Yup, a lemon. I drop a few pieces of lemon peel into the garbage disposal. Then I run the water really hot and turn on the disposal until it’s flushed through.

For a deeper clean in your sink drain, add 1/4 cup baking soda to the drain and pour in a cup or so of vinegar. It should bubble and foam. That’s the cleaning action! Again, run the water really hot or pour some boiling water down the drain to flush. You can use this strategy on any sink in your house!

To really clean your counters, sprinkle a little bit of Bon Ami cleaner and use a smidge of water to mix it into a paste. Follow the directions on the container to rinse your counters clean. You can also use Bon Ami to clean pretty much any non-porous surface in your home, from the kitchen to bathrooms!

Make Windows & Glass Sparkle

You know what makes windows sparkle? Vinegar.

If you’ve been tracking so far, you’ll have noticed that vinegar is a theme in eco-friendly cleaning.

Create a mix of vinegar and water. Spritz it onto your windows, mirrors and any other glass surfaces in your home. Wipe clean with a dust cloth.

Kill Mold ASAP

Mold and mildew just love to take up residence in my showers and on my kids bath toys. They get really slimy, really quickly.

When I’m looking to get rid of mold in the shower or tub (and anywhere else), I squirt a little bit of vinegar onto the moldy places and let it sit. Then I rinse it off with really hot water.

For really stubborn mold or mildew, make a paste with a bit of baking soda and water. Scrub the spots that need extra attention, then repeat the vinegar mold removal steps. Rise with hot water.

For bath toys, run a hot bath. We’re talking scalding temperatures. Add a good bit of vinegar and let the toys soak in the water for a while. Then add some baking soda and let everything foam up a bit. After soaking the toys a little longer, drain the tub and rise each toy in hot water. Let them dry on some of your DIY dust clothes.

Tackle Tough Floors

Finish your cleaning up with a good clean floor. Grab some more vinegar and add about 1/2 cup to a gallon of hot water.

While it cools off just a touch, do a quick sweep of your floors to get up all the big crumbs and dry messes. Then mop as normal with the vinegar solution.

You can cut the vinegar smell by adding a few drops of essential oils to your floor solution. Literally, just a drop or two will do the trick.

To freshen up your carpets, sprinkle baking soda over them. Let it sit for a while. You could do this as the first step in your spring cleaning routine. Or, if you know no one will mess with it overnight and before you start cleaning, sprinkle your carpets before you go to sleep.

When you’re ready, just vacuum up the baking soda! The natural odor absorbers in the baking soda will capture the yucky smells and leave your carpets springtime fresh!

What are your spring cleaning tips and tricks? We’d love to check out your best ideas!

When my parents were house shopping, way back in the early 1980s, they made a list of possible properties. Then they went to each and every home to take a tour. And then, after weighing all the options and running the numbers, they made a decision. They took their time, were careful.

Cut to 2015. And I’m looking for a house across the country from where I currently live. There won’t be any in-person home tours for me, just a bunch of online listings with a ton of (possibly misleadingly staged) photos. My contact with the listing agent or home owner will be almost exclusively through email.

So far, we’ve been pretty lucky. There haven’t been any real issues for us yet, knock on wood.

Find a Rental Home from Far Away

How have we managed to hit the rental property lottery so often over the course of a decade of military life? Honestly, I don’t know.

But this year we’re on the hunt yet again. Except that this time there are several continents and an ocean in between our current location and where we’re looking for homes.

This year, we’re trying a few different techniques to find our next rental home from far away.

Start With the Basics

First, you need a place to move. As long as you’ve got a general next location, you’re golden. Take my advice, gained over the last 10 years, and do not house hunt before those orders drop. It just leads to disappointment all around.

Once you know where you’re headed, start narrowing down your possible options.

Here’s what we look for:

• short commute distance
• BAH rates
• schools
• playgrounds and parks
• running routes
• safety
• public transit

Once we’ve set up these parameters, it narrows down our search area. This allows us to focus on just one or two specific zip codes or a few neighborhoods instead of hunting everywhere.

All the Real Estate Apps

My first step in years past has been Craigslist. Even I’m cringing right now, typing the sentence. Even as recently as 2012, going the Cragislist route might have been okay. But between then and now, it’s gotten a good bit sketchier.

Which leads me to the apps. We’re talking Zillow, Trulia and MilitaryByOwner. Most properties are cross-posted, but there could be a rare gem that’s only listed on one of the apps. We’ve also noticed that sometimes the same property has different pictures on the different apps.

I really like MBO because it’s military specific. The homes listed as typically owned by military families, either active duty or retired personnel. And they’re looking for military tenants. You can also search by proximity to your preferred base.

I’m constantly scanning the search results on all three of my apps. I mix up my filters, switching up zip codes and rental prices.

Using the real estate search sites allows me to narrow down my search, excluding any houses that don’t fit my exact criteria. That saves me some heartache in the long run.

Power of Facebooking

Back in 2015, I found a home in the perfect location with the exact right features via Facebook. The current tenants, another military family, posted their rental property that was coming up for a new family. I reached out, sent a message and within just a few days that house was ours!

In just the last few years, tons and tons of Facebook groups have sprung up aiming to help families PCSing. They are location specific and members can post housing searches and listings.

These Facebook PCS-specific groups as well as more general military spouse groups create easy ways to grab houses before they hit the market. Plus, by using your connections, you’re able to rent a property that is already military family-approved!

Lots of Legwork

I love leg day at the gym, but don’t really enjoy chasing down real estate leads. Still, getting into the most ideal home for us does require a good bit of work.

With each promising house that pops up in the searches, I mark it. It goes onto the list of the day. My husband and I sit down to go over the options every night or so. the houses we decide to keep on the list each get an email via one of the apps.

Now, not every email we send doesn’t get a response. The people we do hear back from, we review those responses and decide which homes to pursue further.

This process of email, review, respond and pursue keeps on going until we find “the one.”

Enlist Extra Help

Now, in the past, we’ve done this mostly alone, with maybe a little help from Facebook connections and military spouse groups. That’s just not cutting it with an OCONUS move.

So this time around, we enlisted the expert advice of a Realtor. We chose someone who also happens to be a military spouse. She’s totally in touch with the unique concerns and considerations of this lifestyle. It’s been so helpful to have an extra set of eyes looking for properties!

Plus, should we need someone to visit a home or give us a neutral opinion, she’s right there for us. And our Realtor can also get paperwork started on our behalf.

Seriously, I don’t know why we didn’t go this route sooner!

How do you search for your next home when you’re far away? Share your tips and tricks!

By Marguerite Cleveland

     Now that my husband and I are facing retirement from the military, I’d like to share some things I wished I knew or would have done differently.

• Buy or make the measuring board that tracks your children’s growth. This cool idea wasn’t invented when I started out and it was so sad to paint over those measurements over the years. This way you can take it with you from duty station to duty station.
• Buy the Trailer or RV. I really wished we had done this our first big move all the way across the country as the travel pay would have almost paid for it. It would have been nice to have our own place to stay and carry a little more stuff when we have had to wait for housing or a place to live.
• Always take advantage of Temporary Lodging Expense(TLE). When you PCS you get a certain amount and days for travel and you don’t need receipts but to take TLE you must have a zeroed out lodging receipt which shows you have paid for the lodging. I’ve met so many people who have camped out in their house while waiting for the movers when they could have had a bed to sleep in each night. In addition to lodging it includes a meal allowance based on the number of dependents based on their age. You don’t get this at all if you don’t use it. It is good for 10 days, five at either end of a PCS move or you can break it up how you like up to 10 days. This is for CONUS moves; there are different rules for moving overseas.
• Keep a ledger with every address you live at. Bonus points for keeping the names and phone numbers of people you knew when living there. You will need this for security clearance updates, some job applications, if your child goes into the military and many more. It is nice to have it listed in one convenient place.
• Always travel with the bolts, screws and other small parts to put your furniture back together. Nothing is worse than trying to find which box those parts are in when trying to set up a bed when everyone is tired and ready for bed. I know people who have elaborate systems for color coding the moving boxes. I have never been that organized but I can see how useful that could be.
• Save every piece of military paper work EVERY PIECE. You cannot imagine how many times we’ve had to reference obscure paperwork over the years. My husband has a big binder for orders, awards, school certificates and then everything else goes in a box. He has had to verify he has attended a school and now facing retirement he has had to dig up quite a few things from his service.
• Always embrace your new duty station. I can remember a move to Fort Leavenworth when we were put in extremely small, substandard housing. At first glance it would appear to be a terrible assignment. It turned out to be one of my favorite. Everyone in the neighborhood had young kids the same age as mine and families would often do impromptu potlucks and we’d all eat outside to get out of our small spaces. There will always be a silver lining if you are willing to look for it.

     What are some things you wished you had known about military life that could have made it easier?

Marguerite Cleveland is a freelance writer who specializes in human interest and travel stories. She is a military brat, a veteran and now a military spouse.  Her military experience is vast as the daughter of a Navy man who served as an enlisted sailor and then Naval Officer. She served as an enlisted soldier in the reserves and on active duty, then as an Army Officer. She currently serves as a military spouse. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two sons. Visit her website www.PeggyWhereShouldIGo.com