What A Week #1

(This is long, and only family may care to read this.  Please excuse my spelling mistakes, spell check says that it is all wrong due to the fact that spell check is in German.  Also, I'd like to insert several pictures, but the internet speed is too slow at the hotel.)

This has been quite a week.  It is hard to believe that a week ago we had loaded up the cars and boarded a plane.  It was only 3 hours and both Anya and Noah slept for most of the flight.  Awesome!  When we got to Baltimore we were going to have an entire day layover before flying to Germany.  We gathered our luggage, without the help of a little sherpa which was quite a feat, and headed to the Double Tree.  I knew it was going to be great when we walked in and the kids were handed cookies.

Double Tree turned out to be our stress free vacation of the summer.  We went to the rooms and just sat.  Big fluffy beds. To quote one of the boys, "This is no La Quinta!" 

We had nothing to pack.  We had nothing to clean.  It was heavenly!  We slept in and stayed in jammies most of the next day.  Only changing to put on swimming suits.  (On a side note, that was the last time I think I've been warm.)  We spent the afternoon showering and getting ready to make the next jump of our trip.  We had an 1130 PM flight, and needed to show up ONLY 5 1/2 HOURS early to get our seats!  The military likes to make sure that you are not checking in at the last minute.  We wondered the airport, ate dinner, hung out at the USO eatting the free girl scout cookies, and then boarded the plane an hour before take off.  Just making sure we'd be on time, awesome military.  Of course we were about 30 minutes delayed. 

As it got closer to midnight, Anya got meaner and meaner.  Loudly protesting her lack of a decent crib.  The plane was filled with guys deploying, and I kept thinking that they would be begging for the cots in Afghanistan before the flight was over.  The kids finally slept and Darin and I enjoyed dinner at 1 AM.  Eating airplane food at that time is really pretty messed up.  But, hey everyone else was doing it.  We slept for only a brief time before it seemed that the sun was up way too soon.  We lost a day somewhere around Iceland and landed in Germany in the early afternoon, Tuesday.

Darin picked up our rental van while the kids and I waited at the terminal.  The van is a crazy smart car meets van hybird.  It has 7 seats, but absolutely nothing else can fit.  We found the little village of Eulenbis and our cute room. 

We spent the next few days sleeping in until 11 AM and staying up until 11 PM.  The kids had lost all sense of schedule.  We froze and went on walks around the village.  Darin, poor guy,  was on base inprocessing all week.  We ate at Taco Bell and Burger King!  It was terrible!  We were so disappointed to have been in Germany, but unable to eat anything decent.  The third night we went to a pizza Pirate joint in a tiny Germany village.  It was run by Italians that took way too long to feed my starving family.  The pizza was really good and gone in 60 seconds.  So my first mealoff base in Germany wasn't even German.  Friday night we went to the little cafe run by the lady who owns the hotel we are in.  It was homecooked German food.  It was really delicious.  I had some swine shinetzel that was yummy...I actually don't remember what it was really called, but I think I'm close.  :)

During this time we saw 2 houses.  We decided that we loved the second one that we saw.  It is way in the German countryside.  It was huge (Yeah, came to Germany to find my biggest house yet.).  It is in the school district that we wanted. And there was both a kindergarten for Noah and a bakery for me.  However, we struggled because it is 20 km from base.  That is only about 12 miles.  But it will take about 25 minutes for Darin to get to work due to the cute, twisty, tree lined roads and villages that he'll drive through.  We were talking to a lady in the library that just kept telling us that it would be terrible.  We would hate it.  It is too far and we will want to move. (I hate it when people are negative like that.) We thought and thought and the only downside was the drive.  We decided that we would be driving at least 15 minutes from anywhere, and that house was worth 10 more minutes.  We will move in on the 8th.  We will be surrounded by Germans.  We are excited.  The village is North of Ramstein in a little place called Muhlbach.

We tried out our ward today.  It is HUGE!  Something like a billion people.  15 families just moved out and last week they apparently read in 8 new ones.  Primary has 250 kids (so glad that isn't my job) and it is all really loud.  I instantly missed my Branch in Turkey.  Small and intimate.  This is anything but.  We'll have to travel about 40 minutes from our house to get to the church.  I am going to really have to think about any RS/Ward extra activities, like I really need the excuse.  The good part of it all is that there are a ton of youth.  The boys will have lots of kids with them.  All the boys have over a dozen kids in their classes.  I hope that it turns out well, but with the nature of military, we know there will be constant transition in the ward. 

A couple of favorites from this week:
*YOGURT!  Finally we have decent yogurt again.  How I have missed it.
*The boys are very happy.  All of them have said that they are really excited to live here.  They all LOVED the house.
*We feel that it is a blessing to have found our house in such good time.  We expected to be without one for at least a month, but will be living in it just 2 weeks after arriving.
*Wondering through the German grocery makes me smile.  It also made me miss our friends from Turkey.  It seems that certain things and experiences just go with certain people.
Bads:
*German washers and dryers
*Small sinks without garbage disposals
*68-70 degrees in July