Time travel sure is confusing.
After arriving "home," it was difficult to fight the urge to go directly to sleep after a long day of traveling. In order to adjust to our new timezone we would have to try and stay awake as long as possible. To do so, we hit the ground running and started some errands, unfortunately, the dogs couldn't help and we didn't trust them to have the run of our apartment - so we had to put them back into captivity, their crates. For the sake of brevity, our "handler," Steven, was a wealth of knowledge and helped make the early part of our move a smooth transition. Once we had our luggage and Haustiere in the apartment our first order of business was to get the proper identification to access the surrounding military bases.
Ramstein Air Base (RAB) was a ten minute drive from Landstuhl and as new arrivals we went to Building 134 located at the west gate. This is the visitors center and also issues CAC identification cards - to complete this process, we needed our passports and Julie's duty orders. Our experience went somewhat smoothly, the confounding issue was that customs didn't officially stamp our passports upon entry into Germany. Having arrived a few hours earlier, we still had our airline tickets and that seemed to suffice. Once we had our ID's we were free to enter the air base, where Steven had a mini-tour planned to get us acquainted with our surroundings.
Our tour started with a quick visit to the "any town USA mall," otherwise known as the eXchange/BX/PX/Mall (better known as Dante's 8th circle of hell). The mall comes complete with a movie theater, kiosk stands, two banks, the outdoor recreation facility, plenty of shops, and of course, a food court - complete with familiar franchises; Johnny Rockets, Taco Bell, Subway...and so forth. Our next stop wasn't really a stop, more of a fly-by - we drove past the Commissary (definitely Dante's 9th circle of hell) and the Lemon Lot adjacent to the North Chapel - a place to look for a cheap beater car. There were two more planned stops and other logistical obligations to tend to near the library. While waiting here, we picked up the ever important German Driver Licence Booklet (more on this later). Before heading off base, Julie and I requested that we walk across the street to see the library.
After we received our library cards we had one final stop, Steven's house in Ramstein-Miesenbach to gather some of our unaccompanied baggage. Before moving, we shipped five storage containers to Steven's APO address - an incredible way to get assorted necessities to Germany before we arrived. We returned to the apartment, unloaded the burdensome containers and departed ways - now it was just the four of us, zwei Haustiere und zwei Menschen. It was early evening and we were starving, our last meal was on the airplane and now it was time for dinner. A short walk from our apartment we stumbled upon Oscar's Irish Bar, there was outdoor seating and German beer beckoned both of us. We made our best efforts to order in German, however, we were greeted with English - the location is heavily American, so it was nice to have an easy night not worrying about speaking broken Deutsch.
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| View from our apartment |
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| Other side of Kaiserstrasse |
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