The Moving Trip to Germany (Tuesday - Wednesday)

As Ken mentioned, I've been typing all of these thoughts out in Word until I could post them. Here goes!

We left Indianapolis around 1:30 Tuesday after a crazy morning of running errands. Pop and Grandma Lawrance were kind enough to drop us off at the airport and Margaret Foltz was our “sending off crowd” by joining us there for lunch. The flights were uneventful. The only crisis that we had was in the hour layover in the Amsterdam airport. First of all, the airport terminal is a long line rather than the hub and spoke style. There was also no tram or shuttle from one side to the other and, as expected, our flight came in on one side and departed from the other side. It was about a 30-minute walk. Then we had to go through customs and, as is expected when you are tight on time, got in the slow line. My bag got stopped going through customs. According to the security, my laptop lock is a risk and I had the choice of checking it or having them discard it. I carried this lock on airplanes with me to Washington D.C., Belize, and Germany and not one guard had questioned it. We didn’t have time to check it, so we had to watch them discard our $50 lock.

National Starch’s cab driver picked us up at the airport and took us to our flat. Inge, our relocation consultant, met us there with the keys. She took us to get registered and to research banks and U-Bahn passes.

We forced ourselves to stay up until 9:30 PM to see if that would help us get onto Germany body times more quickly rather than napping. If you do the math, this meant that we had been up from 6AM Tuesday (IN time) to 3:30 PM Wednesday or 33.5 hours. I was able to sleep an hour and a half on the plane, but Ken didn’t sleep at all.