If you are thinking about attending your Soldiers Family Day and/or Graduation start by setting up your travel plans. The professionals at Victory Travel, Fort Jacksons very own Travel Office, are ready to help you plan your visit and answer your questions. They can book your travel and accommodations (both on and off post), click. Schedules may vary, please contact your Soldier’s battalion to verify Family Day and graduation times and locations. The day before graduation (typically Wednesday) is designated as “Family Day.” Family Day activities begin at Hilton Field at 9 a.m. The battalion commander meets with family members and friends of graduating Soldiers to discuss the Soldier’s recent experiences and answer questions.

Family and friends will also meet the unit’s drill sergeants and observe demonstrations of Soldier skills. More about Family Day. Most importantly, you will meet – and spend time with – your Soldier. During the evening of Family Day you can join your Soldier for a buffet dinner at one of the clubs on the post.

A general headcount is needed, so please let your Soldier know how many guests will attend. Tickets can be purchased during Family Day activities. Graduation is the following day at 9 a.m. (Spring/Summer schedule) or 10 a.m.

(Fall/Winter schedule) on Hilton Field, unless otherwise indicated. See your Soldier’s unit page for the correct time and location. In the event of inclement weather, the ceremony will take place at the Solomon Center and the time schedule may change to accommodate more than one ceremony. More about Graduation Day.

Most companies will post their individual graduation dates on their specific unit site. However, you can get a consolidated graduation date calendar Hilton Field Finding Hilton Field for your Soldier’s BCT graduation has never been easier. Simply follow the. Maps & Directions Fort Jackson is located in Columbia, South Carolina. The city is located in the center of the state and is accessible from three major highways – I-20, I-26, and I-77. I-95 and I-85 are a short drive away. Fort Jackson is located at exit #15 off of I-77.

The nearest airport is the Columbia Metropolitan Airport located about 25 minutes from Fort Jackson. An option is to fly into Charlotte, North Carolina which is about one and a half hours away. As soon as you know your soldier’s graduation date, call Fort Jackson’s Victory Travel Office at 1-800-221-3503 for assistance making local hotel reservations. To make arrangements to stay in a cabin at Weston Lake Recreational Area, call 803-751-5253.

Fort Jackson is located in Columbia, South Carolina. Located in the center of the state, the city is accessible by interstate highways I-20, I-26, and I-77. I-95 and I-85 are also a short drive away. Fort Jackson is located on I-77 South at exit #15 and I-77 North at exit #15A.

Tune in to Radio Station 1680AM for Fort Jackson updates. The nearest airport is the Columbia Metropolitan Airport located about 25 minutes from Fort Jackson. Another air travel option is Charlotte, North Carolina which is about one and a half hours away by car.

Before leaving home, make certain your soldier has met all the requirements for graduation and will be granted pass privileges during your visit. Your soldier should provide this information no later than the eighth week of basic training. Entering the Fort Drivers of all vehicles must show military identification card. Vehicles without military ID must be sponsored to enter Fort Jackson. If you are here for the Family Day/Graduation of your Soldier then you should have already received the information needed to enter from your graduating Soldier. Graduation Videos Fort Jackson is making graduation videos available to Family members! These videos will typically be available for the weekend following each graduation.

You can check to see if your unit’s graduation video is available by loading the video player at the top of each page. To see a sample video of previous graduations visit page. If you would like a copy of the graduation video or videos of your Soldiers BCT experience, you can purchase DVDs through. Additional Graduation Information:.

A BLUE-FACED, faintly hung-over monkey perches near the ceiling of the British-born designer Caroline Weller’s living room in Jaipur, in the north Indian desert state of. Of no precise species (the pout suggests macaque, the tail langur), he appears in a trompe l’oeil tracery of faux windows in a 16-foot-long and 10-foot-high mural — the first sight to greet visitors walking into the flat-roofed contemporary house built in accordance with the Hindu principles of Vastu Shastra, which strives for an alignment with the natural elements. The primate overlooks a room painted flamingo pink, pinker even than the terra-cotta ramparts that encircle the old city a few miles from this quiet residential enclave. Note that the monkey is not merely decorative. His presence is documentary: Weller’s family has been stalked by macaques ever since they came to live in Jaipur a decade ago from New York City (via Bangalore). The animals roam the streets at will, uprooting plants from pots, leaving trails of dirty handprints and peering through windows.

Once, a macaque leapt on Weller’s partner, the fashion photographer, and tried to bite his ankle. And yet: Could the monkey also be a stand-in for Weller herself, an arch observer and wanderer? The mural is both a backdrop for her life as an expatriate in India and an analogue to it, suggesting an openness to happy accidents as well as an ability to pragmatically maneuver around obstacles and limitations. Like the magic-realist prints, gossamer cotton clothes and table linens that Weller designs for her five-year-old fashion and home line, (sold at Saks Fifth Avenue and through ), created in local family-run workshops specializing in centuries-old and embroidery techniques, the painted wall and the house it defines draw from tradition without being beholden to it.

Caroline Wozniczkas Travel Planning

WELLER, 46, GREW up outside of London, the daughter of a doctor and a banker, camping out in the hollows of her mother’s rhododendron bushes and communing with her imaginary penguin friend. While studying fashion at university in the early 1990s, she veered from the expected path, going to India for an internship at, a Jaipur-based textile company dedicated to reviving the then-languishing block-printing industry.

After graduating, she made her way to New York, designing at J. Crew, Club Monaco and Calvin Klein before landing at Armani Exchange. But corporate fashion made her restless. So it seemed like serendipity when, in 2008, she got a job as a creative director of a new lifestyle company in India.

With Davenport and their son, Gil, then 18 months old, she moved to Bangalore only to witness the global economy disintegrate and, with it, funding for the nascent brand. Rather than slink back to New York, though, the family headed to Jaipur, to which Weller still felt a strong connection from 15 years before. They didn’t have a plan — “only a plan for adventure,” she says — but she quickly found work consulting for former colleagues in New York on projects involving Rajasthani crafts, as well as an airy 2,500-square-foot house located next to a nature preserve.

(Weller goes for runs there, alongside the yogic breathers, the sari-and-sneaker power-walking women and the occasional leopard who also populate the park.) Foot-long lizards bask in the house’s front yard, which, depending on the season, may be shadowed by blossoming champa trees or towering stalks of heavy-headed dahlias. Peacocks case the premises; mosquitoes go rat-a-tat at elbows. The spirit of the outdoors has crept inside: The living-room sofa and easy chair are clad in Weller’s — a swirl of tousle-tailed birds and flowers so vivid they seem to pulse against the dark linen upholstery. The kitchen, once a near-empty shell, is now briskly functional, equipped with a stove top fueled by a gas canister and a reverse-osmosis filter through which drinking water is piped into an enormous clay pot called a matka. From every air conditioning unit, tubes run down to little pitchers — the runoff is used for watering plants and mopping floors. Weller strives for similar sustainability with Banjanan, transforming scraps and surplus into limited-edition pajamas and patchwork quilts.

Caroline Wozniczkas Travel Planner

Allowance for error and imperfection is woven into the spirit of her line. Through Banjanan — the name is a tribute to Rajasthan’s nomadic Banjara tribes — Weller has discovered that no two block-printed textiles can be the same. Every design is set using multiple blocks, with one color and outline per block, each carved out of teak and cured in mustard oil for two weeks, then dipped into a tray of dye and pressed to the cloth, with a swift knock on top to make sure the image takes hold. The fabric is pinned to 16-foot tables that the printers slowly work their way down, tapping block after block. Sometimes the patterns don’t align or the dyes fail to dry and bloom beyond their borders (no printing is done during the monsoon for that reason).

Caroline Wozniczka Travel Planner

It’s the tiny flaws, and the sense of a human hand, that give them depth. That same play of disparate elements in surprising harmony is apparent throughout the house. In the living room, a carpet by presents a modern take on traditional village patterns, with fuchsia flowers that seem to trail off in places for a weathered effect. In a sunroom with pistachio walls and a chevron-tiled floor sit teak armchairs, reproductions handmade to order by a Bangalore company called; the originals were designed in the 1950s by Pierre Jeanneret, the cousin and collaborator of the Swiss-French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier, for offices and public spaces in Chandigarh, the north Indian city the two men helped build from scratch. Jeanneret was Le Corbusier’s man on the ground: He lived in India for years and came to understand the environment and people’s daily lives.

Weller respects his commitment to place. She’s slightly uneasy when Western fashion executives, wanting to use Rajasthani crafts, swoop in for a few nights, all the while talking about “saving” and “empowering” local artisans, as if their companies weren’t also benefiting from the exchange. Weller feels a bond to the patternmakers, color specialists, tailors, embroiderers and block printers she collaborates with, almost all of whom live within a few miles of the Banjanan studio. But she recognizes that, at the end of the day, there’s a transaction. “They do good work, and I pay them for it,” she said.