Guest Post: Goodfellow Air Force Base

Hi guys!  I am in California for vacation and wanted to have a few guest posts share with you about where they call home at the moment!  If you would like to guest post about your duty station or location, please email me at soldierswifecrazylife (at) gmail (dot) com 🙂

Hi! I’m LC and I blog over at Faith & Deployments (link: http://flightlinefightline.blogspot.com). We recently just had our first PCS from Langley AFB to Goodfellow AFB. For those of you who don’t know, that’s in Texas, inside San Angelo to be exact. San Angelo is the largest “town” in Texas that is not located near an interstate. In fact the closest interstate is over 2 hours away in any direction. The town caters to the military and even the liquor stores give discounts to military. The graciousness of the town is heartwarming and the locals are more than generous on their hospitality and help.

I absolutely love this town, but the base has been more than an adjustment. It is strictly a training base for all branches of the military. There are no planes and the only permanent party members (here for longer than 6 months at a time) are the instructors. Few families move here and only 240 base houses for all 5 branches of the military. So base housing is almost impossible unless you have special circumstances.

That’s okay though because the entire town is teenie tiny (maybe a 20 minute drive from one side to the other) and renting an apartment or house is dirt cheap. Well worth living off base under your BAH limit. Which is a plus since GAFB has the lowest BAH rate of all the US bases.

Getting information on anything is rare and hard to get. Since 80% of the people in the offices are just students waiting for their classes to start they aren’t trained on information of the office they are volunteering in. Be prepared to do lots of research and get a lot of wrong answers. My suggestion is to take names and what branch they are from and when you find the individual you need to speak to, you can give them solid information to try and correct the issue.

Offices and activities on base are on odd operating hours, most of the entire base shuts down 2-3 times a month for “trainings” and this can create a problem with needing doctors’ appointments or papers signed during in-processing or out-processing.

Since the base is a training base the gyms are flooded with military members straight out of basic, lots of marching troops, which create long traffic jams; as the military members are required to march everywhere they go and have their meals at certain times during the day.

Fraternizations of different ranks is strictly enforced on the base as well, regardless if your husband is prior service or not, so be forewarned that it is incredibly hard to find a social group outside of personal interests or a spouses group.

They have a brand new combined spouses club that has been working to do more and gain membership. They mainly cater to moms and mid day activities, but are working hard to do more.

The one blessing and yet it’s a curse about this base is that it is in the middle of Texas. But it’s hours from any airports of awesome cities: 4.5 hours from Dallas, 4 Hours from both San Antonio & Austin, 6 hours from Houston. But it makes it nice to be away from the hustle and bustle of city life.

There are so many family-owned businesses that give San Angelo huge amounts of character. Surrounded by a town that idolizes the military, who couldn’t ask for a better base to be at?