From Los Angeles to Harrogate
Hello. Nearly *gasp* twenty years ago I started keeping a journal on paper. Five years ago I started a website The Adventures of the Layman Family. With a move to a new country, I figured now would be the time to try my hand at blogging.

Four days ago, my ten month old son, Ryan, and I departed LAX. My parents very kindly drove us to the airport and helped with all our stuff. Because of airport/airline staff incompetency and equipment malfunctions, we very nearly didn't make our flight. However, once on the plane everything went quite smoothly. Ryan makes friends wherever he goes. Before long he was playing with two very nice boys from Northern Ireland who were sitting behind us. Both the flights (LAX to London and London to Manchester) went smoothly. Ryan is a champ at travel, whether by air or land, local or international.

I've been the to UK a few times before. I've been to London three times, and to Scotland once for a week, so the landscape wasn't totally alien. However, after such a long trip (a ten hour flight to London, a two hour layover, and an hour flight to Manchester), everything seemed a bit unreal. We went to the Hard Rock Cafe in Manchester for lunch, then drove to our new home in Harrogate. We live on a street called Dragon Parade. That is so cool! Our house is a two story Victorian style, with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a small patio in back. It's long and narrow, and has lots of windows but not much of a view from any of them. Some of the windows have stained glass, which is nice. We lived on post in Germany, so it will be interesting to live on the economy here in England. The electrical outlets are different from those in the States AND in Germany. We're using transformers for our American appliances. Luckily, our German stuff works here with a simple outlet adapter.

So far we've run some errands on post and have just been trying to get acclimated to the new locale and time zone (8 hours later than California). Things are definitely different here. It helps that we lived in a foreign country already. It makes things less of a shock and gives me some idea of what to expect. However, I am not looking forward to learning how to drive on the "wrong" side of the road!

My goal with this blog is to chronicle our time here in the UK and keep friends and family updated on what we're doing and what life is like here. I'm hoping that if I write a little each day, I won't get epically behind the way I have in my paper journal and with my website. We'll see what happens!