It took us almost an hour to check in our thirteen pieces of luggage:) We were allowed to take FIVE bags eachperson, something like 70 lbs each, but of course we didn't have THAT much stuff:)). I think we had four huge suitcases, one medium-big suitcase and the rest were carry-on size suitcases, some of them simply stuffed with pillows:)). One suitcase was just full of shoes since if you multiply everything by five, that's a lot of shoes needed. Anyway. The biggest adventure was to see if they would let us take our Mac computer on board. Robert had built a special fancy box for it, with a rope handle and everything, but we were worried about the dimensions. After all--nope, not a glitch with it. Easy! We were so relieved as it was going to make our life so much easier to have the computer right away.
Our one surprise was the fact that our direct flight London-Raleigh did NOT have individual TV's. So our kids' dreams of watching three movies for eight hours were crushed. They still had TV's but were showing some questionable shows like "Ride Along 2" which we didn't let the kids listen to. We did let them watch "The Martian" though. Anyway, we survived, and the kids did great despite the lack of individual entertainment.
Customs at Raleigh was a breeze! It's a smaller airport so we didn't have to wait long at all. So awesome. We got all our luggage finally! "Welcome home!", said the immigration officer.
And then we waited for just a few minutes for Dr. Kofford to come pick us up. Somehow we did not lose our suitcases that were not super tied up on the trailer, but I was very nervous about that. He drove us to Dr. Jones' house, whose family actually wasn't there but they were letting us stay there. It was very kind of them especially because they didn't really know us even! Dr. Kofford left and we took Dr. Jones' van and drove back to Apex to get some CHICK-Fil-A! That's right! Our first meal in the states was Chick-Fil-A:))
And that's all I remember from that day. It was kind of a blur, a sunny hot blur as we were adjusting to 90 degree weather. It was wonderful to not feel cold though.
Fast forward to Sunday--great first day at church. We are part of the Morrisville Ward here. Right that morning at church we were invited to lunch by the Martin family. People were so generous and so nice. We made some friends right away.
The following Monday we moved into our house. We didn't have any furniture but we did have some blow up mattresses and sleeping bags with blankets. So it was not so bad after all. We were so blessed that this house that we signed the contract with WITHOUT even seeing it turned out to be a great house! At 2200 sq ft it is officially the biggest house we have ever lived in if you don't count our fancy house sitting gig for 10 months in Maple Grove, MN.
On Tuesday or Wednesday we drove up to Norfolk, VA in a rented minivan to pick up our own minivan! We couldn't believe how lucky we were that it took only a few weeks for it to get here! It was a fun adventure. Originally, Robert and one of the kids was going to just drive up there in a rented car and drop the car off there and get the van, but then Enterprise upgraded our rental as they needed a minivan to be driven up to Virginia. So we agreed to do that for the price of renting just a sedan, and we ALL were able to come. That made it easier to drop off the rental as we had two drivers. On the way back we had lunch at Cracker Barrel, which forever became Mark's favorite restaurant-hahahaha:). I just love seeing our kids experiencing their firsts in America:)
Later that week we went to Costco and set up our cell phones, and got our internet figured out with Time Warner Cable and went food shopping...stuff like that. Life was kind of odd those days and we just had to live through that and be grown ups:)
From that Monday, August 1st till Friday, August 5th we kind of had to get by with whatever we had. But on Friday our household goods came!! It was perfect timing and we couldn't believe how lucky we were. We were glad to see our stuff back....But it took the movers 10 hours to get everything unloaded and unpacked! And we didn't even ask them to unwrap everything. Apparently the movers in England wrapped and wrapped everything so much, even boxes, that it took a lot longer on this side to unwrap them. Granted, these SIX guys here weren't prepared to do their job properly actually...they didn't even have box cutters or tools (had to borrow Robert's tools). We were less than impressed with their work, and I didn't feel one bit of pity when I had to ask them to reassemble Katya's bed as they put it together right but with the wrong height without checking with us first.
Phew! And that was done!
Now we just had to wait for our unaccompanied (stuff we lived with for 7 weeks in England after all of this big stuff had been shipped) and our two storage shipments--one from before we moved to Japan and one from when we moved from Bury to Brampton.
And that's how we roll...
Moving back from overseas is quite an experience. I am glad it's all over for us. For now. Sadly, we'll need to move AGAIN in a few months, so every time I was unloading boxes with this move all I could think of was...how I will be loading those boxes back up soon. All 13,000 lbs of our stuff.
Lyana.
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