The old saying is that you should be careful what you wish for. Now we know why that is said. As we were languishing here in Europe waiting for the clock to run out on our tour here, quietly grumbling about the old world ways shunning large shopping malls in favor of Mom and Pop shops that were closed every other day, mandatory garbage recycling that requires a Phd in engineering to comply with, and pantomiming simple questions to the locals only to find out that they speak better English than you do and let you continue out of sheer entertainment value; it became necessary for us to make a whirlwind tour of the homeland.
We flew out of Frankfurt on the 14th of March bound for Colorado Springs in order to get Al, Mollie, and Max cleared out of the old homestead as they departed for their tour in the Azores. After becoming preferred customers of Home Depot and Jack Quinn's Irish Pub in a matter of a couple of weeks, we decided that Pam's Corolla which had been languishing in the garage there (theoretically), wasn't going to be large enough to carry all our suitcases and critical care items on the next leg of our journey. Off to the Toyota dealer. We spent a week beating up the salesman and his manager and finally got a reasonable deal on a new ride more suitable for the Big Apple, a 2007 Camry Hybrid which we promptly loaded to the gills and pointed East.
3 days later, we cruised into Gotham via the Goethals and Verrazano bridges and headed for a hotel on Long Island which would be home for a couple of weeks while we familiarized ourselves with the school and the area. It has become quickly apparent that unless you are independently wealthy or willing to take on a mortgage the size of Nicarauga's national debt, you weren't going to be buying a house within half a hockey season's drive of St. John's.
After an extensive amount of wrangling with the military housing office, a process that would burn every byte of memory available on this page to describe, we were finally able to get confirmation on a future residence in Garden City.
There were a few days of walking around the the campus and getting brefs from the current cadre at St. John's then off to Western NY for the Easter weekend with old friends from a lifetime ago. Back to the city and a few more days working out transitional issues at the university then south to Virginia for School of Cadet Command.
Arriving in Virgina the same day as the ominous occurences at VT, got to spend 8 solid 10 hour days at Ft. Monroe receiving briefings about scholarships, medical boards, university relationships, recruitng, ad infinitum; punctuated only with nightly excursions to Harpoon Larry's Oyster Bar.
We did find one day to cruise through Virginia Beach and Colonial Williamsburg. Then back to NYC, park the car, and get back on a plane for Frankfurt arriving back in Deutschland after 6 weeks, just in time to get ready for the movers who are showing up this week.
Through it all, we have disovered that 1) NYC is just as big and daunting as we imagined it to be and 2) every New Yorker that we met is nicer and more helpful than we ever could have imagined anyone to be.
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