The Journey to Missouri

At 8am on the Monday morning, after a very full weekend of sightseeing we attended several briefings from the Embassy. They were about lots of different things like pay, allowances, American culture, housing, driving etc. The man giving the lecture said that some of the locations you will be living in are going to be very different to what you are used to and far more remote than the UK, I believe that we even have a family going to Missouri! From that point on we were referred to each time they put up joke slides of horrible trailer park accommodation etc ‘oh yes, that will be in Missouri, haha’, kind of funny but also a little alarming. I must say I began to worry about exactly what we were letting ourselves in for if even the Embassy staff were laughing at us and wondered if it was too late to change our minds! I didn’t get the chance to ask because Mini Monkey took this opportunity to run away, around the room, behind the power point and up to the speaker. Daddy Monkey then politely suggested that I remove both myself and her from the room. The guys then went off for further briefings and we had lunch and waited, and waited and our taxi for the airport arrived and Daddy monkey still wasn’t back. He eventually arrived a bit flustered (they had run over) and we dashed off to the airport – late – and hurried to the check in. The individual bag allowance turned out to be a strict 50lb limit. We were obviously travelling with far more bags than any normal holiday and whilst they had all been accepted onto our international flight with no problem it turned out that when they were weighed for our domestic flight they were all around 54-56lb and this was unacceptable. Therefore with not that long to go until our flight, feeling a bit stressed to start with and with a long queue of people behind us we had to open and re-pack all of our bags. Mini monkey took it upon herself to grab items out of our open cases and run off with them, easily slipping under barriers and gliding around other passengers’ legs with Mummy Monkey in awkward pursuit and Daddy Monkey steaming away by the cases and trying to find small heavy items to put into our hand-luggage. Luckily the strange system they had was that you were given the bags back after they were weighed and then took them somewhere else to check-in so I was able to start sneaking things taken out of the bag being weighed and put them into the weighed bags. Eventually they were all sorted and the lady even let us off with the final bag being 1.5lb over weight, only because I think she was probably fed up with us by then. We rushed straight through to the plane and it was tiny, it had propellers and everything! Inside there were 2 seats on one side an aisle and 1 seat on the other. Daddy Monkey sat with Mini Monkey on one side and I sat on my own, about 2 minutes later I sat on one side with Mini Monkey and Daddy sat on his own. Mini Monkey would have liked this to continue indefinitely however the fasten seat belt sign came on and off we went. They kept the seatbelt sign on for the first hour with me trying desperately to keep squirmy, screaming Monkey in her seat and the nasty airhostess walking up and down telling me that Mini Monkey needed to be seated properly with her seatbelt correctly fastened (yeah, you try and keep her still!). When the sign eventually went off I practically threw Mini Monkey at Daddy (she had been crying for him the whole time) only for the airhostess to say that Mini Monkey could not sit with Daddy because there was only one drop down oxygen mask on that side of the plane. Simple; Daddy and I swapped seats. Mini Monkey then started screaming for me (typical!) so I moved over and we all sat together. Oh no, this was also unacceptable because despite the fact that there are actually three oxygen masks on that side apparently some flight law says that a child of 2 and over has to be in their own seat. After a particularly awful flight during which Mini Monkey did not stop screaming we eventually arrived in St Louis (pronounced St Lewis as I keep being corrected) at around 7:30pm, picked up our hire car and drove the 2 hours to our new home.

Washington

We have been pretty busy since we arrived here in the US and I am going to try to remember everything so here goes…

We flew around 7.5 hours from Heathrow to Washington. Mini monkey was pretty good on the flight and quickly made friends with several other small children and played nicely in the aisles. We had a fairly bumpy landing which made me turn white and quite literally grab the sick bag just in case and mini monkey throw her arms up in the air and shout weeee… typical. The weather in DC was hot, even in the evening when we arrived. The hotel was lovely and in a great location – thanks Embassy. That night we just went for some food and then crashed out in our room, we were all shattered and jetlagged.
We spent the first full day walking, walking and walking some more. We got sunburnt (not mini monkey), blistered feet (again not mini monkey) and bitten pretty mercilessly by the mosquitoes (all of us but especially me). We loved Washington; it is great; grand and green. However I was surprised at how small and relatively unimpressive the white house is in comparison to its neighbours. In fact when we first saw it daddy monkey and I spent some time discussing firstly if it was actually the white house and then if it might in fact be the side view we were looking at (as we busily turned the map round and round and did lots of frowning); but it wasn’t, it was the front. I think my favourite place was definitely the Lincoln Memorial and the wonderful view across the reflecting pool to the obelisk.



































We then headed to the Smithsonian museum area via a variety of other monuments and landmarks, and had a look in the air and space museum and the museum of the Native American. If we had more time and did not have a small and easily bored child we could easily have spent several days looking at all of the museums, there were a mass of them and they are all free and really excellent.

Day two we decided to get a day pass for the metro and head to a few specific locations like the Arlington Cemetery, The Pentagon, and the Library of Congress etc again a long and tiring day. We decided to get off the metro one stop before the cemetery and walk down to it but as we got up into the station it wasn’t obvious which way we should go so we asked the ticket lady who looked at me as though I was stupid and told me that to get there ‘ya’ll need to head on all back down and ged’n the blue line for one more stop’ I explained again that I had chosen to get off here and wanted to walk; with the same expression on her face she said ‘but why, why ya’ll wanna walk’ I explained, she said ‘no, ‘arl tell ya what ya’ll wanna do, ya wanna get back on the metro, ‘arm not een sure it’s possible to walk tut cemetery from here’ I finally convinced her to give me directions and she walked away muttering and shaking her head. About 7 minutes later we arrived at the cemetery, on foot, and I can now confirm that yes, it is possible to walk there from the metro station.

We were totally amazed and impressed by the sheer scale of everything over here. They are such a patriotic nation and have invested such thought, effort and money into commemorating every single conflict they have been involved in and every president who has ever been. Even the walls of the metro contained quotes and references, every spare inch of space has a memorial of some type and I think I respect their attitude and outlook in these matters. Overall we had a fantastic weekend in Washington and I would definitely like to go back at some point and visit all of the museums and institutes we didn’t manage to see. However by the time we got on the plane to St Louis we were exhausted and very stressed, more on that in the next instalment.

(I'll have mine to go please)