Living in Billeting

Once we arrived in London, the next few hours were pretty much an exhausted blur. No, I didn’t really sleep on the plane. Where was a bottle of wine when I needed one?! We landed at Heathrow Airport around 11am…which was only 5am back home. Ugh. We were picked up by a friend of Andrew’s from tech school and his wife. I’m so thankful we didn’t have to figure out that leg of transportation! They drove us around the general area we would be living in (which I barely remember) and took us to a local place for lunch. They also let us use their phone to call home…but no one answered, haha. Oh well, at least they knew we weren’t lost in the Atlantic. 🙂

I could hardly stay awake in the 15 minute car ride from their house to the base! I HAD to take a nap, and then, of course, I couldn’t sleep that night. It probably took me a good week to fully get adjusted to the time change. Besides that, the biggest thing I had to get used to was hearing jets all day. They are LOUD! And the fact that everything seems to close at 4:30pm. Off of the base, anyway.

Oh yeah… and driving on the other side of the road. And the other side of the car!

Oh my brave husband! We rented a car after a few days on base, but it took me nearly a month to work up the courage to try driving. Scary things I didn’t want to face:

1. Very narrow British roads
2. Very fast-driving British people (at least to me, who dared not drive over 30mph)
3. Shifting with my left hand (I hit my right hand on the window several times…how embarrassing)
4. Roundabouts with multiple lanes! Ahh!
5. Cars parked ANYWHERE

Well, eventually I did face those fears. And now (with our American car here), I feel completely at ease driving. Except for those big roundabouts. Those still intimidate me a bit! And I still detest parked cars. Seriously, people can park on the sidewalk, facing either direction, in the traffic lane… it’s so annoying. But I’ve gotten pretty good at navigating for the pair of us. Thank goodness for the GPS feature on my phone!

Andrew had briefings to go to right away, so that left me sitting alone in our hotel room (billeting) a lot. I watched a lot of British TV shows… mostly game shows and antiques shows. We didn’t have an actual kitchen, so we ate a lot of sandwiches and microwavable meals. And we ate out. A lot:

I think you get the idea. Lots of pub food, for the most part. We did eat at a few really great restaurants as well though. Of course, they were more expensive, so we didn’t go to those very often! Needless to say, I seriously couldn’t WAIT to get into a house to cook some real food!