England, baby!

I have a feeling all of my posts about England will be interspersed with quotes from the FRIENDS episodes set in London...so be prepared!

We finally made it to England and Lakenheath today, after an exhausting day (or days? I've lost track)! We started out in Phoenix, caravan-ed down to Tucson with our parents (and 7 bags), made a quick stop at Davis Monthan and took an obligatory picture out front:

We then said a very tearful goodbye to our families (we miss everyone already!) and headed to Houston. We arrived in Houston on time, found our new gate and were working on charging our iPod when I made a quick run to the bathroom. I was in there and heard an announcement saying "Boarding all seats for flight 4 to London" and ran out thinking that can't be right - we hadn't heard a single announcement! Apparently we missed the whole boarding process (they must have started boarding early due to the huge amount of people on the flight), so we were the second to last people on...but we made it! We ended up having the row to ourselves, and each seat had it's own TV in the headrest in front of it! We were like 5 year olds with those TVs - there were games, movies, TV shows, music - we didn't whip our computers or anything out for the whole flight!

Thomas didn't really drink that (he slept through some of the flight), and when the flight attendant saw our little vodka bottle (thanks for that best friend!) she told me that we weren't supposed to bring our own alcohol on the plane because it's like "bringing alcohol to a bar." I didn't fully understand that...plus why else would they make bottles of alcohol under 3 ounces?! Oh well, I didn't need anything to make me even more emotional anyways ;) 

Our first glimpse of England! It's so green!

Made it to Heathrow Airport, got our luggage (fairly quickly actually, I was impressed!) and headed to customs. The customs lady saw on my card that we were going to be there for four years but saw we had no house address. She couldn't understand how we were moving to a foreign country but had no house...I told her to take that up with the Air Force because I don't understand either. But I got my stamp and we were on our way!

My first passport stamp!

We had to wait a couple hours for the shuttle to take us to base - we had to fight to stay awake while waiting, especially since there was no internet at Heathrow (silly). Shuttle finally arrived, and we stayed awake long enough to see this street sign which I took as a good omen:

We slept on the shuttle ride to the base (once we got out of the city), and arrived 2 hours later. We checked into the hotel, had a minor snafu with our luggage storage situation but we got it sorted it out and set off to explore the base. We found the commissary, the base exchange, Taco Bell (we weren't very adventurous on our first night here), and most importantly...Baskin Robbins!

On Lakenheath

Leaves changing colors - we were so excited to see that.

We're making ourselves stay up until 8pm so we can get acclimated to the time change over here...7 more minutes! Hopefully we'll have internet at the hostel we're staying at for the next 2 nights, we'll keep you posted!