Welcome to Germany...

Do you all remember the movie "The Princess Diaries" where Princess Mia is flying on her own private jet into Genovia for the first time? She looks out the window to see rolling green hills and a castle? Joseph comes to her shoulder and says "Princess Mia, welcome to Genovia...." all big and dramatic?

Well minus the castle and the private jet, that was the moment I had when we first flew into Germany.. I had just woken up from a quite uncomfortable, but still well desired 3 hours of sleep to see rolling hills of huge trees. It was absolutely beautiful!...

As Julian and I were waking up and trying to convince our minds that it was 10 am in Frankfurt- although in NC it was barely 4 am- we were being shuffled off a plane into the Frankfurt International Airport. I told Julian that the baby was having a hayday with my bladder and I really needed to use the restroom, only to get into the restroom and not know how to flush the toilet or turn on the sink....eventually I figured it out but it then hit me...."Toto, we aren't in Kansas anymore...." Haha jk jk (I don't know where all these movie references are coming from. Evidently this is what being sleep deprived does to me.) It really hit me that we were in a completely new country about to start the next three years of our lives here.

It has been a very crazy 24ish hours as we traveled from Norfolk VA, into Charlotte NC and then finally to Frankfurt, Germany. We are now trying to figure out how to get to Bamberg, Germany-hopefully our resting area(there is still a chance our orders will be changed to a different location. We will find out in about an hour.) We are sitting in the USO within the airport and were told that a bus will be taking a group of us to various posts around Germany. The bus will be arriving at 1330 and we have about a 2 hour bus ride to arrive in Bamberg.

Currently that has been our entire experience here. Nothing too crazy exciting has occurred yet but we have only been here about two hours. We have arrived safely though, all of our baggage made it just about in one piece(one suitcase is slightly torn but nothing too dramatic). We did get delayed stateside causing us to miss our first flight to Germany(we were supposed to arrive in Germany at 7:20 am) but we made it in one piece and that is all that matters. Overall everything went extremely smoothly and the Lord really helped work out all the messy details, and for that we are extremely grateful. Illianna has been kicking around all morning trying to figure out what is going on. She is doing really well though and growing nice and big. Hopefully within the next two weeks I can get a doctors appointment and get this little one checked out because it has been six weeks since my last appointment and I will be about 32 weeks before my next one if I had to guess. So please be praying for an easy transition into Germany as well as finding a great doctor here that can take over mine and Illianna's care. Thank you everyone for all your support and I will be talking to you all just as soon as possible!!

Alyssa Julian and Illianna