Moving to England!!

Well, we finally found out where Jay is getting posted! He'll be posted to Menwith Hill, in the northern part of England, in early February. It's about 20 minutes from Leeds, near the town of Harrogate. Harrogate is a former spa town, with mineral springs and lots of fancy Victorian architecture. We're looking forward to it. It will be a big change, and a big move, and right now we're still waiting for a lot more information. We don't know, for example, exactly what he'll be doing, or how long we'll be over there.

The good news is, Leanne will be able to work while we're there. What kind of work, we don't know yet, but there's a Department of Defense elementary and high school on the base, so subbing will be a possibility. We will likely have a house rather than an apartment. Many people have already offered to come to visit. :-) And air travel within Europe is extremely cheap, so we'll be able to do a lot of traveling and sight-seeing. And as with all PCS ('Permanent Change of Station") moves, the military pays for movers to pack all your household goods, so we won't have to do that on our own.

The bad news is, we have to move out of the country just a couple weeks after the wedding. That's going to be a significant amount of chaos, even with the military doing the packing. The worst part of moving there, though, is that we'll have to put a lot of things in storage. We can take the car and both bedroom sets, but we're still going to be limited in what else we can take. We're already trying to figure out what electronic gadgets we'll take, what we'll replace over there, and what we'll do without for several years. Electricity is different there, as are plug shapes, and while some of our electronics include converters (or can work on converters and/or adapters), we're not going to be able to take most of our favorite kitchen gadgets. (The KitchenAid stand mixer will definitely get replaced; it's an essential to us already. And the KitchenAid folks say that all the attachments will work on an American or European machine.) :-) Plus, houses are typically smaller, and built-in closets are apparently pretty rare.

We'll manage, of course; we both always do. We'll continue to keep you updated via this blog (which I will update more frequently, I promise!!) as we learn more.