Katterbach, Germany

I was assigned to the 3/158 Aviation Regiment of the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade and stationed in Katterbach, which is a part of the Ansbach community.  Katterbach is a small Army Kaserne (Kaserne means army camp in German) and is located just west of Ansbach (for those of you with Google Earth).  In fact, if you zoom in, you can see all the helicopters, it's pretty neat.
 
There were some trains on Katterbach, so Collin was thrilled to see them, especially since they looked like James (from Tommy).

 Malisa and Collin on Katterbach

We had lunch at a little German cantina.  It's a Deutsch-run place on post and the Frau that works there is really sweet.  They have typical German dishes like brautwurst and schnitzel, but the servings are huge and it's very good.  You order your food and she looks at you and says "Oh, very good!" like you made the perfect choice and that's what she would have ordered too.  She also spoons out kid portions of whatever you order for Collin and only charges you 80 cents for his.  In fact, all three of us ate for only 8 Euros and best of all...beer was cheaper than water!  80 cents vs. a Euro. 

There are parks everywhere, and we saw this one while driving along next to the barracks.  Collin wanted to stop and check it out, so we did.

Captain Collin in our tiny little hotel room.  We lived in a "pet friendly" room for the first couple days that we were here, so it didn't have a carpet on the floor, but we've since moved to a suite which is like a really nice furnished apartment. 

Collin had this really cute little doctor scrub outfit.  I let him play with my stethoscope a bit and we had fun listening to each other's heart.  Don't worry, he only had the medicine as a prop for the photo.

Collin and Gunner running around the room.  This room was awesome but we were only able to stay in it for like 1 night before they heard Gunner bark.  About a minute later we had a phone call that said we couldn't have pets in this room and had to move to a tiny room without carpet because we had a pet. 

I was able to stuff Collin in my rucksack and carry him around.

We went and looked at a couple places to live.  There's no on-post housing available right now, so we had to look at a couple government leased apartments near Katterbach Kaserne.  The first one that we looked at was nice, but a little too small for the amount of stuff that we have.  It was a two bedroom apartment to the east.  The 2nd place we looked at had a really nice view of farmland below and was in a very cute little town called Bruckberg.  It was another 2 bedroom place, but they didn't have broadband internet available, so that was also a no-go.
 
Here's the house, the view and the little Ford Focus that we rented to scoot around in until we buy a car.

Here are some pictures of the town where that house was located.  The first is a little outdoor café.

A church and a WW II memorial located just down the road from our apartment.

We went up the hill from that memorial and found a nice building (we think it was some sort of hospital) that had a fountain and some rose bushes nearby.

This is one of our favorite pictures of all time!

We were supposed to look at a 3 bedroom house today that the lady at housing said we could move into on July 9th but......our car is locked in a parking garage until tomorrow morning, lol.  Stay tuned for that story....