MamaCharlie refers to it as the "House of Our Heart".  We spent more than five years at Patch Barracks in the suburbs of Stuttgart, Germany.  The little town of Vaihingen is about five miles from downtown Stuttgart, and Patch sits on the northwest edge of the town.  It is a small kaserne;  it houses the Headquarters, United States European Command.  We loved it there.  We could walk from one end of the post to the other in less than ten minutes.  There was a PX, Commissary, Rod & Gun Club complete with skeet range, Audio-Photo club, theater, gym, O Club and NCO Club, gas station, garage, snack bar, library, thrift shop, ice cream parlor and pizza shop.  And K-12 schools right on post.  And more.  
I have written a number of articles about our life there, or more accurately, my work there.  I worked in the Protocol office of the Headquarters.  My official title was Protocol Driver when I moved up to that office, but it should have been "doer of whatever the E8 doesn't want to do".  However, I have already written about that.  I learned a lot there.  But when I think of Patch, the first thing that comes to mind is the little three-bedroom apartment we seven lived in.  And all the good things that happened there.  
One year we went out the back gate and walked a couple of miles into the woods and bought a Christmas Tree from the Forstmeister.  The kids were really excited because we had had some snow on the ground and capped the trip off with hot chocolate and cookies.  But we chose poorly...the durn tree was dead in a week, dropping needles in a brown blizzard whenever anyone walked by it.  So we trudged out to the forest again and bought a second tree that year.  
After a couple years of backaches, MamaCharlie and I went to Robinson Barracks furniture store and bought a queen-sized bed.  We had that same box spring and mattress from 1979 until well after we retired from the Army and moved here to the Swirl.  Our five-year mattress lasted eighteen years.  
One of the best parts of life at Patch was the weekends when we took off on an adventure of unplanned discovery.  We discovered a lot.  We would take any route that appealed to us at the time and if we saw a castle or church or market or lake or something that caught our attention, we would chase it down and explore.  The kids loved it, but me and MamaCharlie loved it more.  We found so many places that became favorites of ours:  Weil der Stadt, a walled city along a river that I have never seen on any tourist guide to the Black Forest (it should have been, but thank Heaven it wasn't);  Tubingen, an historic university town that has a town center that looks like it did in the middle ages, all half-timbered buildings and frescoes and cobble-stone streets;  Babenhausen Monastery, just a really cool place to visit and see how monks lived back in the day...and the grape vines with trunks as thick as trees that grew up the side of the wall;  The Marchengarten, behind the Ludwigsburg Castle, with squirting water traps, fairy tale displays, and fun, fun, fun;  Esslingen, whose New Rathaus (city hall) replaced the Old Rathaus across the square; the old one was built sometime in the 8 or 9 hundreds and the "new" one was built in the 1200's or so;  and so many more.  Germany is a place where you can be driving through a thoroughly modern town, go around a curve, and be in the middle of a centuries-old town square.  It's kinda like a full grown Disneyland.
Patch is the first place we lived with all five of our kids.  Boogie was born while we were there, at the Army Hospital at Bad Cannstadt.  One of my favorite memories of the event was bringing a four-year-old MamieLady up to the maternity ward and sneaking through the head nurse's office onto the ledge that ran around the building (hold on there, it was at least four feet wide and had a three foot wall).  We snuck down to MamaCharlie's room and saw the little six-pounder, then snuck back.  We had just come out of the office when the head nurse got off the elevator.  She looked at MamieLady and sternly informed me that NO children were allowed on the ward!  I humbly mumbled something like, "yeah, we found out, we're just leaving"...MamieLady and I giggled all the way down in the elevator...and she was so proud to be the first kid to see the new baby.
Patch was a great decompression between the high-pressure world of the 7th Infantry Division we had been in at Fort Ord and the high-pressure environment we would return to in the 7th Infantry Division at Fort Ord.  Patch is a place we all recall with fondness.  We grew a lot as a family, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  It wasn't all hearts and flowers;  we had some challenges there, too.  But it was a great period in our family's history.