Cirque

Last week a traveling Cirque show came to Lakenheath to put on a FREE show for us! I'm not one to pass up a free show, so I went with some friends to check it out. It was awesome!! I'd never seen a Cirque show before, so I didn't know what to expect, but it was extremely entertaining. The things those performers can do, and how they can twist themselves was incredible! It made me cringe many times, and there were lots of gasps/eye covering in the audience during some tricks, but the performers did a great job. Hopefully they come back next year! :)

Joan Mann Sports Day

A couple of months ago, Thomas and I got a chance to be a part of an awesome day that RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall sponsor every year, it's called Joan Mann Sports Day. Hundreds of athletes get bussed in from all over England, each volunteer got paired up with an athlete, and then we got to play games all day! There was a parade, tons of games, food, and a medals ceremony at the end. My athlete's name was Jo, and Thomas' athlete was Allison. Thomas loved Allison because she reminded him of himself - she didn't like to talk too much, but she LOVED to play the games! We had so much fun, and Allison even won a medal at the end of the day!!!

Waiting for the athletes to arrive

Jo and the fire dog

Thomas and Allison

Me and Jo

They had a C-130 there for us to look at and go inside!

Allison got the GOLD medal!

Staff Sergeant Starr!

Thomas tested for Staff Sergeant about a year ago, found out he made it, and finally sewed on his stripes in July! He had to go through a very time-consuming 6 week class, and we had a nice graduation dinner/ceremony for that. The next week they had the official promotion ceremony where Thomas got presented his certificate from the Wing Commander, and got his stripes tacked (or punched) on. He is such a dedicated worker, and I'm so proud of my Staff Sergeant husband :)

Thomas' ALS class

Getting his ALS certificate (sorry for the bad photo!)

Thomas with some guys from his shop

Celebrating :)

First day with his new stripes! Can you tell he's sick of me taking pictures? ;)

Promotion ceremony - getting his certificate from Commander Quintas

Getting his stripes tacked on - they punched him hard!!

Which one is not like the others?

This isn't relevant to anything, but I saw this on base and couldn't help but laugh:

Someone brought the Hummer from the U.S. to the U.K.! I was worried about bringing my car over here, thinking it might be too big, but I couldn't believe someone would bring their Hummer! The roads are so narrow here, plus if you buy gas off base it is about $7.50/gallon...can you imagine filling that bad boy up?!

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!